A couple of weeks ago Liz and I had the pleasure of speaking at LIFT+Fing France, a great conference about technology, design, society and the future. The lineup was fantastic and both the in-band and out-of-band conversations were great. I would not have predicted ahead of time that I'd end up discussing crowdsourcing techno-anarchist eco revolutions, but there we were and it wasn't even that many glasses of pastis in. ;-)

My short talk focused on how Lawrence Lessig's concept of read-write culture applies to the computer-driven making of physical things, rather than just media, and how this has the potential to change our relationship to objects.

The end of Read-Only material culture, as I mark it, began in 1985, with the release of the Apple LaserWriter, which was the first mass market device that merged the flexibility of bits with the tangibility of atoms. It could provide the precision and control of Industrial Revolution tools, with the flexibility of pre-Industrial Revolution techniques. It did this by making the instructions, the code, the knowledge for every part of the finished product changeable, while the end result was completely consistent. Now, someone can buy the tool, have it produce great results without any modification OR look at the knowledge that's embedded in it AND change it to suit their needs. Until desktop publishing, typesetting was very expensive. Now, what was an expensive process reserved for special occasions is nearly disposable.

Information processing as a material changes everything it touches, often in unpredictable ways, including the tools used to make end products. Ubiquitous computing isn't just about offices and homes, but garages, workshops and assembly lines.

The full presentation (752K PDF) is available.

[Also, in the presentation I say that Lessig is at Stanford, but I've now learned that he's moved to Harvard.]

[Liz's talk is on slideshare: Designing for Urban Green Spaces. She also took very extensive notes on many of the presentations.]

Here's the summary:

According to Lawrence Lessig, the 20th century is a brief period of Read-Only culture in a world that in the past has been Read-Write. He draws his examples from media, but the same ideas apply to other products. The definitions of "producer" and "consumer" change when information is cheaper to move than objects. Thus production becomes less centralized as knowledge is shared in an open and standardized way.

Modern digital tools for making things bring the flexibility of digital media to the creation of everyday physical objects. This change powerfully challenges 20th century manufacturing processes that depended on centralizing knowledge while transporting products cheaply. Today, atoms are getting more expensive to move, while bits are getting ever cheaper. Read-Write culture is returning to the processes of making things, bringing the end of Read-Only objects.

It's a short talk, so I'm not going to talk about the relationship between lightweight data-driven manufacturing and ubiquitous computing, but for me there's a direct correspondence. "Everyday object + information processing + networking = something new" (in simplified ubicomp math) is a superset of "tool + information processing + networking = a new tool." The products of those tools don't have to be digital objects, but the fact that the tools are digital profoundly changes the capabilities of those tools to create objects. When those (digital tool-made) objects then have embedded information processing and networking themselves--as now is increasingly happening--that changes the nature of the further object still.

Oh, and thanks to Liz for her thoughts and editing of my summary...she will also be at LIFT, sharing the stage with John Thackara and speaking about urban green spaces in a talk that has evolved from her ETech presentation earlier this year.

Here are several of them, and the products they're tracking:

- High Fashion, CertiLogo (a client of mine)
- High Design, ThingLink
- Food, TraceTracker (and a BusinessWeek story about them)
- Food and high technology, YottaMark
- Food, FoodLogiQ
- Pharmaceuticals, mPedigree (another BusinessWeek story about them)
- Goods in general, Sproxil, which appears to be a for-profit venture by the founders of mPedigree, a nonprofit.

There are many other companies that are doing other kinds of identification (for example, tesa scribos, but

I'm very flattered, and although the coinage of the specific term is roughly mine, I did not originate the concept. The idea of data entities associated with objects, but having lives of their own, probably goes back as far as the oldest identification technologies, but there are several precedents that deserve mention (especially Adam Greenfield's). Here's a tiny bibliography of two of them (and thank you Google Scholar for helping me find them).

Data shadow

More modern references can be found at Word Spy

Informational Shadow

Davidson, Paul, and Louise Davidson. The Collected Writings of Paul Davidson. 1990. (this is a collection of macroeconomic essays, one of which says that we can't make judgments about the future because it does not cast an informational shadow back toward us--this is a very different use of the term, but still obliquely related)

Greenfield, Adam. Everyware, 2006 (My information shadow is nearly identical to Adam's informational shadow. In Everyware, he writes: "The significance of technologies like RFID and 2D barcoding is that they offer a low-impact way to "import" physical objects into the datasphere, to endow them with an informational shadow.")

Here's the description:

Ubiquitous computing has been here since at least 2005, but we may not have noticed it. Computers are rapidly fragmenting from expensive general-purpose devices to cheaper specialized networked tools (phones, netbooks, desktop RFID readers, MP3 players, running shoe sensors, etc.). These tools bridge the physical world and the Internet in new ways, often using Web 2.0-style interaction to create unexpected ways to work and play in the real world while simultaneously having the power of the Net available to us. This talk will discuss how mashups between meatspace and the Net have already happened, what the emerging patterns are, and how widgetization is about to jump from social networks to devices and then disappear altogether.

The presentation with full text is available here (1.2MB PDF).

I also realized belatedly that I never once mentioned "The Internet of Things" as a unifying concept, but it's definitely what I was talking about. My apologies.

Today was the first day of a workshop I participated in (and assisted with), run by MIT's Eric Von Hippel on Open Hardware (or Open Source Hardware, or Open Design, or however you want to call it). It was a pretty all-star cast in attendance, and I was honored to be among them. I gave a short talk that was a kind of personal history about why I believe that Open Hardware is important. Here is my conclusion:

I think that we are seeing proliferation of small, niche Open Hardware suppliers—a cottage industry—of digital technology manufacturers whose existence owes itself to Internet shopping, online social networks, cheap electronics manufacturing and mutual openness. And every year we are seeing more of these products and more businesses being built on Open Hardware principles.

[...]

This cottage industry is supplying the materials to a much larger group participating in a new culture that treats electronics more like a design material than an industrial process. This I believe points to a much deeper cultural shift. And although on the surface Open Hardware looks like a discussion about the economics of manufacturing and intellectual property, the effect that it has is creating new building block with which people can remake, redesign, their world.

Mediamatic, the Dutch technology/culture organization ran a one-week RFID social games workshop last year. A group of 30 people, many of whom are not electronics engineers by training, created a dozen complete, working, completely novel technologies in less than a week. This kind of wild experimentation, using technology to create new social relationships would simply not have been possible without Open Hardware. And it is in these kinds of environments in which the truly magical, deeply disruptive technologies are created.

That, I believe, is the key power of Open Hardware.

You can find the presentation is available(520K PDF) for download and via Slideshare:

I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's discussion. Eric has said that he'll make videos of the whole day's presentation and discussions available, and I'll link them here when those have been posted.

I presented a talk at ETech today. It links the capabilities of ubiquitous computing and intersects it with service design to come up with a justification for creating subscription-based services out of (certain) everyday objects.

The original description is

Things have long had identifying marks, from silversmiths’ hallmarks to barcodes, but mating machine-readable identification with pervasive networking greatly increases the value of the marks.

For example, when a machine-readable identification method such as an RFID or a high-density visual code is combined with the wireless networking of a mobile phone, a new way of interacting with everyday objects is created. Once you have the capability uniquely identify anything immediately, you can attach meta information to it. Any meta-information. How much is this worth on eBay? Which of my friends has one? Will this go with my Mom’s china? Will it make me sick if I eat it? Was it made by children?

I call this digital representation as accessed through a unique ID, an object’s “information shadow” and I now see them attached to just about everything. Beyond getting meta information, however, lies an even more powerful concept: changing the physical object to a service, for which the thing you’re looking at is but a single instantiation of that agreement. It’s already happened to media, and to car-shared cars and shared bicycles in urban areas.

When this happens, the objects have to change at a fundamental level. They have to be designed differently and they have to be described and discussed differently. The “owner’s” relationship to the object changes. The very idea of ownership changes. The solid object grows a dotted line that is filled-in as-needed, when-needed, and with the features that are needed. This is not the same thing as renting or co-ownership, its anytime/anywhere nature-enabled by the underlying technology makes these new service objects fundamentally new.

This talk will discuss the implications of the social and design changes created by these technologies and give multiple examples of services that already exist.

I've put up a PDF with all of the images and notes(884 PDF), and Slideshare, which is missing many of the images (I think it doesn't know what to do with pictures that have been pasted into Mac Powerpoint 2004), but still has all of the text.

As has been obvious in the recent past, I've been a bit focused on how and why disciplines, especially disciplines relating to ubiquitous computing, are named what they are. I'm not a language precision pedant most of the time--words mean what we want them to mean, when want them to mean those things and to the people we want to understand--but the titles of large ideas have a particularly strong impact on how we think about them. They, in effect, set agendas. If the scientists had called Global Warming something else, say "Global Weather Destabilization," that would have changed a lot of our expectations for it. People wouldn't nitpick about whether one degree is a lot or a little or whether an unusually cold winter in Michigan means that it's all a sham.

Similarly, what we call disciplines we involve ourselves in sets a lot of expectations for the agenda of those disciplines. Lately, I've been thinking about why "ubiquitous computing" has such problems as a name. When I talk about it, people either dismiss it as a far-future pipe-dream, or an Orwellian vision of panoptic control and dominance. I don't see it as either. I've never seen it as an end point, but as the name of a thing to examine and participate in, a thing that's changing as we examine it, but one that doesn't have an implicit destination. I see it as analogous to "Physics" or "Psychology," terms that describe a focus for investigation, rather than an agenda.

Why don't others see it the same? I think it's because the term is fundamentally different because it has an implied infinity in it. Specifically, the word "ubiquitous" implies an end state, something to strive for, something that's the implicit goal of the whole project. That's of course not how most people in the industry look at it, but that's how outsiders see it. As a side effect, the infinity in the term means that it simultaneously describes a state that practitioners cannot possibly attain ("ubiquitous" is like "omniscient"--it's an absolute that is impossible to achieve) and an utopia that others can easily dismiss. It's the worst of both worlds. Anything that purports to be a ubiquitous computing project can never be ubiquitous enough, so the field never gets any traction. The mobile phone? That's not ubiquitous computing because it's not embedded in every aspect of our environment and doesn't completely fade into the background. A TiVo can't be ubiquitous computing because it requires a special metaphor to explain it. The adidas_one shoe isn't ubicomp because it doesn't network.

The problem is not with the products, it's with the expectations that the term creates.

I see this problem with a lot of terms: artificial intelligence has "intelligence" as part of it, so nothing can be AI until it looks exactly like what we would call intelligence. Machine learning, that's not AI because it's just machines doing some learning. That's not intelligence. Pervasive computing can't exist until we have molecule-sized computers forming utility clouds, because nothing can be pervasive enough until then. Ambient intelligence is an amazingly bad term using this metric: TWO words with implied infinities.

As Liz (Goodman, my wife and fellow ubicomp researcher ;-) points out, when these terms are coined, they are created with a lot of implicit hope, with excitement and potential designed to attract people to the potential of the ideas. But after the initial excitement wears off (think AI in the 1970s) they create unmeetable expectations as the initial surge of ideas gives way to the grind of development, and setbacks mean that the results are never as ubiquitous, intelligent, pervasive, or whatever, as observers had been led to believe. AI was doomed to be a joke for a decade (or more) before they renamed themselves something that implicitly promised less, so they could deliver more.

So what to do about this? Well, I've done a couple of things: I've used one term ("ubiquitous computing") rather than creating ever more elaborate terms to describe the same thing, and I've tried to use it to describe the past as well as the future. In my past couple of lectures I've been arbitrarily setting the beginning of the era of everyday ubicomp as having started in 2005. It's not something in the future, it's something that's in the past and today. Is that a losing battle? Do we need to rename "ubicomp" something like "embedded computing product design," something that promises less so that it can deliver more? Maybe. I still like the implicit promise in the term and its historical roots, but I recognize that as long as it has an infinity in part of its term, there will always be misunderstandings. Some people (like the folks in New Songdo City) will actually try to create the utopian vision, and invariably fail. Some will criticize the field for even trying, while at the same time doing the same thing under a different name.

Me, I'm going to keep calling it "ubiquitous computing" or "ubicomp" until it's either clear that the costs of sticking with the name overweight the benefits I believe it has, or until a better term, one that's less likely to let everyone down, comes along.

(the title of the blog post references Finite and Infinite Games, a book I've never read, but which friends of mine tell me is quite good)

[2/18/09 Update: Michiel asked me (in email, because I have blog comments turned off) what I thought about "The Internet of Things" as a term. I've written about it before and I think it's a pretty good term. It's not as unbounded as the terms I mentioned. "Internet" is something people are familiar with and "things" is a large set, but not an infinite one. There's some internal confusion because "the internet" is seen as ephemeral, and it's hard to imagine how that ephemeral idea translates to the very literal world of "things." Likewise, there's an implication that all things will become part of this new internet, which is also potentially confusing. However, those criticisms aside, I don't think it's a bad term, but only if it's defined well and used precisely. I don't think it's exactly the same idea as ubiquitous computing, for example, since I see it as more about individual object identification and tracking, rather than smart environments, or ambient displays. If it starts to be yet another synonym for ubicomp, its value will diminish.

William sent me the following note:
Interesting observations! Two related bits:

One is Martin Fowler's thinking on "semantic diffusion":

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SemanticDiffusion.html
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FlaccidScrum.html

Another was a recent conversation I had at the Prediction Markets conference with an econ professor. He mentioned that the incentives are such that whenever a term develops a positive value, people attach themselves to it until its value swings negative. I think that basic model is too simple, but from it you can develop a richer model that explains a lot of what people get up to with terms.

I like the economic idea, though I agree that it (feels) too simple. ]

Smart things: the design of things that have computers in them, but are not computers

0. Preface

1. Introduction: The Hidden Middle of Moore's Law

PART ONE: Frameworks

2. Broad concepts

• The relationship between industrial, interaction and service design
• The importance of context.
• The design of social devices.
• Each new class of ubiquitous computing devices is essentially a new tool.

3. Information processing is a material

• Behavior as competitive advantage. When a designer can include information processing in a product for very little cost, the calculation becomes not one of engineering complexity, that’s relatively cheap, but one of competitive advantage.
• How information processing is a material.
• Some qualities of information as a material.

4. Information Processing as Material Case Study

5. Information shadows

• A digital representation is the object's information shadow.
• Information shadow can be examined and manipulated without having to touch the physical object.
• Coates' Point-at-things.
• Sterling's wine
• Design with information shadows.
• Physical/Network mashups.
• Identification as the cornerstone of the Internet of Things.

6. Information Shadows Case Study

7. Devices are Service Avatars

• When the same information can be accessed and manipulated through a variety of devices, value shifts to the information, rather than the device that’s communicating it.
• Devices become projections of services. A number of familiar appliances--cell phones, ATMs--are worthless without the networks they’re attached to. They are physical manifestations, avatars, projections into physical space of abstract services, but are not services themselves.
• Objects become subscriptions.
• Types of avatars.
• Products and services co-design.

8. Service avatar Case Study

9. Applianceness

• Defining applianceness. When computation is cheap, we no longer have to make general-purpose computers. There is no longer the need to think about a one-to-one computer-user relationship that terms like Human-Computer Interaction imply. One human to a multitude of appliances, some of which use information processing.
• Applying applianceness.

10. Applianceness case study

11. Applianceness case study 2

12. Granularity

• A powers-of-ten scale ubicomp experience design.
• Location-based services. How to size up the world.

13. Granularity Case Study

14. Interaction metaphors for ubicomp

• Weiser's calm computing
• Home automation
• The metaphors in the names of subfields
• Magic

15. Metaphor case study

PART TWO: Techniques

16. Design from observation

• Introduction
• "Design Ethnography": it's not ethnography
• Observation techniques
• Design probes
• Learning from vernacular technology
• Cross-disciplinary precedents

17. Cross-disciplinary iteration

• Intro to rapid iteration
• Sketching in hardware
• Hardware hacking: hardware as tracing paper
• Video prototyping
• Interaction vocabularies: Saffer's gestures, Arnall's RFID interaction, etc.

18. Augmentation of existing objects

• What
• How much
• The right kind of augmentation
• Functional vs. decorative
• Physical-Web mashups
• Smart furniture
• Wearables

19. Scenarios

• 10X
• Demography is destiny, maybe
• Mapping between domains
• Realistic bounds, overly positive/negative scenarios, the return of Unintended Consequences

20. Simulation

• Looks-like/Works-like prototypes
• Wizard of Oz
• Elmo++

21. Common design challenges

• Configuration. Out-of-box and beyond.
• Device interconnection. The promiscuous Wiimote holds a lesson.
• UX consistency between devices.
• Introducing novel functionality.

22. Explaining disruptive technologies

• Is a new technology genuinely disruptive? Don't believe the hype.
• Design for disruption.
• Explaining the value of disruption to stakeholders.
• Explaining disruptive technologies to customers.

23. From calm computing to everyware

• Ubiquitous computing is here
• As user experience designers we have a responsibility to think about how to design for it explicitly, rather than trying to use methods from Web design or industrial design.
• In the last 20 years, the understanding of what ubiquitous computing means has likewise grown significantly, and has moved from the idea of office-based productivity that disappears into the background to encompass just about everything except the office.

Sidebar: Software services vs. end-user services

That's where the two concepts diverge:

• From the technical perspective, a service is an atomic unit of functionality. Something that is kind of like a superset of a well-constructed object in object-oriented programming. This is the meaning of the term as used in the definitions of things like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): "Services are collections of capabilities." Footen and Faust (2008)
  
• From the user experience perspective, a service is an atomic unit of activity. It is the elements that would be connected by an end-user when describing something that helps accomplish a specific goal. "A chain of activities that form a process and have value for the end user." (Saffer, 2006)
  

Sidebar: Top-down, holistic service design

• Product-Service Systems (Mont, 2004) emphasize the potential of efficiencies created by designing products and services together, especially ecological efficiencies.
• Service Science Management and Engineering, aka SSME (with D sometimes added for design) or service science (Maglio et al, 2006) is IBM's approach to creating a systematic discipline for understanding and building systems that encompass people, technology, organizations and shared information.
• Service design (Blomberg and Evenson, 2006) is a term used in the design world to describe a practice that designs products in the context of the key value that the organization creating the product intends to provide the end-user.
• Service Blueprinting (Bitner et al, 2008) is a notational technique for visualizing the relationship between service components.
• Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) (Schultz and Kitchen, 1997) is an approach that ties together all communications between an organization and its audience into a single unified strategy. If products and services are considered to be a type of communication, then this approach includes them, too.
• The Elements of User Experience (Garrett, 2000) is a conceptual system for interaction designers that places a range of design practices in a unified user experience model.
• Transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, 2006) describes the practice of create a unified experience across a number of media and products. Like IMC, it's pretty far from the core focus of technology in much service discussion, but I believe there's a relationship. Stories aren't services, but storytelling is, and since digital technology plays such a large role in contemporary storytelling, there's a practical connection as well.

[Basically, in these two sidebars I'm saying that there's one elephant, it's not really a new elephant, but it may be a newly-relevant elephant, and all of these different terms are descriptions for different parts of a single elephant.]

[1/29/09 Update: after a request, I figured I'd post a mini-bibliography to this. Here are all of the books and papers I managed to get into Zotero as somehow related to the topic, though they're not all the papers and books I looked at]

Mini-bibliography of service [design|system|science|development]

Blomberg, J., and S. Evenson. 2006. Service innovation and design. In Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 28-31. ACM New York, NY, USA.

Carbone, L. P., and S. H. Haeckel. 1994. Engineering Customer Experiences. Marketing Management 3, no. 3: 8-19.

Erl, Thomas. 2007. SOA.

Footen, John, and Joey Faust. 2008. The Service-Oriented Media Enterprise.

Gillespie, B. 2008. Service Design via the Global Web: Global Companies Serving Local Markets. DESIGN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 19, no. 1: 44.

Glushko, R. J. Designing Service Systems by Bridging the “Front Stage” and “Back Stage”.

HOLMLID, S., and S. LINKÖPING. INTERACTION DESIGN AND SERVICE DESIGN: EXPANDING A COMPARISON OF DESIGN DISCIPLINES.

Jonas, W., N. Morelli, and J. Münch. Designing a product service system in a social framework–methodological and ethical considerations.

Maffei, S., and B. Mager. INNOVATION THROUGH SERVICE DESIGN. FROM RESEARCH AND THEORY TO A NETWORK OF PRACTICE. A USERS’ DRIVEN PERSPECTIVE.

Maglio, P. P., S. Srinivasan, J. T. Kreulen, and J. Spohrer. 2006. Service systems, service scientists, SSME, and innovation. Communications of the ACM 49, no. 7: 81-85.

Mont, O. 2004. Product-service systems: Panacea or myth. The International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics (IIIEE), Lund University: Lund, Sweden: 233.

Mont, O. K. 2002. Clarifying the concept of product–service system. Journal of Cleaner Production 10, no. 3: 237-245.

Morelli, N. 2002a. The Design of Product Service Systems from a Designer's Perspective. Common Ground 2002.
---. 2002b. The Design of Product Service Systems from a Designer's Perspective. Common Ground 2002.

Pires, G., P. Stanton, and J. Stanton. 2004. The Role of Customer Experiences in the Development of Service Blueprints. In ANZMAC 2004 Conference.

Schultz, D. E., and P. J. Kitchen. 1997. Integrated Marketing Communications in US Advertising Agencies: An Exploratory Study. Journal of Advertising Research 37, no. 5: 7-18.

[1/29/09 Update 2: Jeff Howard pointed me to a comprehensive annotated bibliography of service design that he has compiled. Thanks, Jeff!]

The core of my idea is this: that where ethernet-over-power (also known as Powerline, or HomePlug) is useful is for communication with and control of household devices. I've ranted for a long time that there isn't a good appliance communication protocol, but what I've come to realize is that it's not that there isn't a good protocol, but that all the so-called standards that try to solve smart device communications try to reinvent every layer at once. That's shortsighted, because it ends up with mass incompatibilities at all levels, so there is no agreement between device manufacturers at any level, and all of the consortia are just mini-trusts trying to get vendor lock-in so that they can be the sole suppliers of the technology. It's big companies trying to get vertically-integrated vendor lock-in and failing.

Look, folks, we have all of the pieces and we don't have to create any new standards. Here's how I see it:

1. Wifi is great for moderately high-speed general-purpose communication to easily-movable end-user devices (and I don't mean just "portable," since this includes things like printers and set-top boxes).
2. Cat6 is good for very high-speed communications between devices that don't move.
3. Bluetooth, zigbee, z-wave, and all of the other short-haul, low-power, low-bandwidth wireless standards are good for movable devices that need highly near-range communication.
4. Ethernet-over-power is good for low-speed communication to static devices.

Anyway, I digress. My point here is to discuss a specific application for Ethernet-over-power. I've been enamored with this technology for a while, but it's struggled in the market by trying to compete with Wifi and failing. The lack of a wire, even if it's a power cable, will always beat out the wire. This competition has lead e-o-p's developers to continue to pour money into making it faster, rather than making the technology cheaper. This has limited its use to a small niche of people for whom neither Wifi nor Cat6 Ethernet works. That's essentially like saying "We're going to make cars for people who like cars that are neither fast, nor capacious, nor cheap." Sure, you'll find some niche, but it's not going to be big.

I feel that the big niche in smart household device communication. Essentially, optional low-bandwidth communication between devices that are already going to be plugged in that helps them work together, but doesn't form the core of their functionality.

Let me give you an example:

1. You subscribe your e-o-p-enabled DSL modem to an electricity price service. It gets spot prices every 15 minutes or so from one of the realtime electricity price services.
   
2. It then broadcasts that information as TCP/IP broadcast packets over the local e-o-p network.
   
3. Lights throughout the house/workplace are equipped with a digital dimmer that is listening to power price packets.
   
4. When the price goes over some value (which could be set once a day through a slightly different kind of broadcast packet) the lights go into power-saving mode and dim.
   

The technology all exists. All of it. And I'm sure it's already possible to make it cheap enough that it adds $1 or so to the price of devices at the low end. These devices do not have to be sold in special configurations that only work if you buy a single company's (or consortium's) products, they can just be sold as what they are: lamps, microwaves, picture frames, clocks, etc. The functionality only needs to come into play if you want it, and it device works as advertised whether there are any other devices on the house network or not.

The core value is that this solution creates a market justification for developing inexpensive devices that have the capability of augmented functionality, without requiring that functionality to take center stage in terms of what the devices do. This, I believe, makes the adoption of these devices by consumers more likely, and therefore the further development of such technology, and therefore the network effects that everyone wants. Until people start using the open standards that are already available, they will forever be stuck on lonely, unprofitable islands of proprietary standards, even ones that are touted as open.

[12/31/08 update: I just learned that this is called demand response in the energy business. So I guess what I'm advocating for is technologies for the development of small-scale demand response systems using ethernet-over-power broadcasts of energy pricing information.]

In my presentation I rolled up a bunch of my ideas from the last six months and added some examples of some new projects (such as Disney/TechnoSource's Clickables-PixieHollow product line) and I talked about the iPhone's applianceness.

You can download the presentation (792K PDF) with extensive notes.

The gist of this keynote, as with many of the presentations I've been giving over the last six months, is that a combination of ubiquitous computing, wireless networking and item-level identification is changing the nature of people's relationship to everyday objects. This change, in turn, creates a number of deep user experience design challenges as objects become intertwined with services and as computation becomes a more ingrained part of how the object is designed. In other words, objects that we find familiar now dematerialize into services, while abstract ideas that had been services before materialize as new, and unfamiliar, appliances. This crossover is pretty alien and implies a rethinking of relationships and design processes.

I'm still working on the practical implications that these big ideas boil down to, but I'm beginning to see the outline of what it implies for the world in which design is going to happen for the next 5-10 years.

Materials that dematerialize

In what's becoming a ThingM tradition, I spoke last Thursday at Prof. Kimiko Ryokai's Tangible Interfaces class at UC Berkeley. Tod spoke to the same class last school year. My presentation was called Materials that Dematerialize ( 740K PDF) and it brought together several high-level thoughts I've had recently about how the social effects of ubiquitous computing and Internet of Things technologies create challenges for experience designers. Specifically, it brings together the themes of "information processing as a material" and "information shadows that turn everyday objects into services" that I've recently been thinking about.

Cloud computing, ubicomp, service design, interaction design

Here's a discussion that I had with Tom Igoe and Brian Slesinsky on Facebook in response to another Twitter post I had made (you can find the original here).

Mike Kuniavsky at 6:02pm November 10
A thought: service design is what links cloud computing and ubicomp. It meets industrial/interaction design at the device/service interface.

Tom Igoe at 6:14pm November 10
How exactly does cloud computing differ from the web?

Mike Kuniavsky at 6:20pm November 10
There's terminology slippage, for sure. You could also ask how the Web is different from the 'Net. I think it's a question of where the data lives and whether devices are expected to be the homes of data, or whether data primarily lives in centralized services that live on the Net and are exposed and manipulated by a variety of devices, some of which are physical, some of which live on the Web or other distribution mechanisms. I agree that I think that "grid computing," "distributed computing," "cloud computing" and "service oriented architecture" are probably all describing the same concept. I'm trying to use the most evocative terms and to relate them.

Tom Igoe at 6:29pm November 10
I think the web and the net, there's a qualitative leap there, because the former made visual communication easy, right? I'm still undecided on whether cloud computing offers any new insights on what we're doing.

Service design kinda does, in that it suggests a different way of approaching the problem, in terms of who owns the assets. Though it's basically what Ray Anderson was on about in "Mid Course Correction," but his thinking on that pre-dates service design, and his action probably pre-dates the web. Seems service design mostly gives a name to the concept, and the net -- and the web, if you want -- make it easier to implement.

Sometimes I wonder what ubicomp would have looked like if the web hadn't happened. I suspect the banks and credit card companies would have made it happen anyway.

Brian Slesinsky at 9:34pm November 10
If you don't know or care which machine(s) your application is running on, it lives in the cloud.

Mike Kuniavsky at 11:24am November 11
The question is in the definition of "application." It used to be relatively straightforward to figure out where "the code" ran, but when a widget on my phone sends an SMS to a service that's then syndicated to an aggregator which then generates addition information that's then displayed back on my phone, what's the "application"? That's why the service becomes the focus of the design, because there are now many possible ways that a person can interact with a single set of functions, still have it feel like a single thing at the core, even though there is no single "application" that's running on a single "machine." Think of how the service of banking is provided through ATMs, online banking, phone banking and human tellers, all of which run different codebases on different hardware, and yet still deal with the same money.

[On a tangential note, I was first exposed to the ideas of cloud computing when it was presented as the Andrew File System, a distributed file system that was being worked on at the University of Michigan in the late 80s and early 90s when I was there. It's interesting to see how the ideas of using networks to distribute computing evolve. In many ways the core ideas don't change, but the model of what people need changes, and what was considered esoteric and irrelevant suddenly becomes interesting when framed a different way. In this case, the distributed file system was abandoned and forgotten until it re-emerged as a service distribution infrastructure.]

Woohoo! ThingM's second product, BlinkM MaxM, has hit the store shelves (first at Sparkfun, soon at FunGizmos).

It's (to quote myself), "BlinkMs bigger, crazy sibling. It's an intensely-bright smart LED for prototyping that comes as a package of two components, a control module (MaxM Master) and a daughter board with three ultrabright LEDs (MaxM Blaster). [...] Its trio of LEDs are 50 times as bright as a standard BlinkM and more than 1000 times as bright as a standard LED."

I'm also proud of its interactivity. It has 4 analog input lines so that in addition to being an LED replacement that's smart, it's also interactive. We expect to have some examples showing it in a range of applications soon. I'm most excited by the automotive application possibilities. Since it runs on 12v, you can hook it up to car batteries or (and this is a "don't try this if you don't know what you're doing" type of suggestion) directly to the car's electrical system. The possibilities for gaudy, interactive car lighting are infinite. I'm very excited.

Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design

I think 2005 was the year we began living in the world of commonplace ubiquitous computing devices. That year Apple put out the screenless iPod Shuffle, Adidas launched the adidas_1 shoe, and iRobot launched the Discovery—its second-generation vacuum robot.

Sadly, even though we live in that world, the user experience design of most everyday ubiquitous computing devices—things you see in gadget blogs—is typically terrible. That’s because we do not address ubicomp user experience design as a distinct branch of interaction design, much as we did not treat interaction design as separate from visual design in the early days of the Web.

In the last couple of years, I have conducted research for and designed a number of ubicomp user experiences. In the process, I've seen some of the seams between industrial design, interaction design, architecture, and ubiquitous computing user experience design. In this article, I have tried to pull together some approaches that seem particularly valuable in the ubiquitous computing user experience world. None is unique to it: They’re all general design guidelines, but they seem to apply particularly well to the particular design challenges of this field.

Make Tools, Not Platforms

It is because CPU power is so cheap that ubicomp UX design should concentrate all design and processing on a narrowly focused set of functionalities. Yes, a single device can be a dictionary, a calendar, a notebook, an alarm clock, a TV, an audio recorder, play every media format, and work as an 8-bit game machine, but doesn’t that just sound like an underpowered laptop?

Define Services Before Designing Devices

ThingM, my company, developed WineM, our prototype smart wine rack, as an avatar of a service. The rack uses RFIDs on each bottle to track where every bottle is and then displays information using glowing LEDs behind the bottles. When we designed it, we treated the rack as one way to provide access to a service that associated a specific bottle with metadata about it, which was in turn part of a system that linked wine producers, distributors, retailers, and consumers together in such a way that everyone in the chain benefited from adopting the technology. The rack is a particularly visual manifestation of the service, but the service would be available through an API that could be accessed through many avenues.

Don't Overload Affordances

Mixing the two philosophies can create confusion. Your doorknob doesn’t double as a volume control for your stereo, though in today’s fly-by-wire world, it can. For example, when BMW developed its iDrive system, which mapped a large number of different functions to a single input device, the mismatch in expectations created interface havoc that took the company many revisions to correct.

(image copyright Nick Humphries, CC Licensed)

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Respect the Society of Devices

(image copyright Joichi Ito, CC Licensed)

Riffing off of Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind, let’s call this technology cloud the society of devices. Each device does something specific, and some are more powerful than others. How do they all work together? How do they integrate into the larger set of devices and services out in the world?

On the interaction-design level, this means understanding users and their needs in light of the all of the devices that they may have. For example, while it’s possible to get email on many different devices, presenting it in a way that respects the unique constraints of a device and stays consistent with other devices becomes key when helping people transition between them. Text email accomplishes this using a universal format (text) with a well-defined structure (To:, From:, etc.). The minute that an attachment is included or there is HTML in the message, that consistency vanishes.

Create Physical Behaviors, Not Visual Representations

Industrial design incorporates the physical senses of temperature, texture, and vibration into devices. Ubicomp UX is essentially the coupling of these two sets of ideas to create behaviors that match information priority with available sensory bandwidth and less cognitive load.

For example, say I’m looking for a new apartment in the town where I already live. I don’t need to move, but I’d like to. I set my (hypothetical) GPS unit to download a data stream of apartments that match my criteria of price, size, neighborhood, and proximity to at least three cafes with free Wi-Fi. As I drive/ride/walk around the city when I approach one of these locations, the GPS vibrates in proportion to how well it matches my criteria. I don’t need to look at it; I just need to feel it to get the crucial piece of information.

(photo by Timo Arnall)

Use Information Processing As a Material

I believe that ubiquitous computing technologies are incredibly powerful. However, ubicomp user experience design is still a very young discipline, without a track record of obvious best practices. In its failures, we see the inadequacy of applying older design paradigms to the capabilities of new technologies. If design people first encounter new technologies through design, then careful reflection on our design processes early on is essential for increasing the chances of technology’s positive impact. That time is now.