Category: design

Batteries not included

Published June 11, 2011 by cgerrish

Recently I’ve been using a very simple analytical technique to look at a variety of systems. I’d describe it as a blunt rather than a fine edged tool. The metaphor breaks down around the edges, but the yield is still quite good.

Systems require energy to remain organized, otherwise they fall prey to entropy—they start coming apart. The system must at least match the power of entropy to maintain the status quo. That level must be exceeded to refine the granularity of its organization. For the purposes of the analysis, I’m using electricity as a metaphor for power. The tool is employed like this:

– Does it runs on battery power?
– Must it be plugged into an outlet?

Let’s start with the characteristics of the plugged-in. For these systems, electricity is a utility, an assumption, a constant. Power is commoditized and on tap in the environment. Whatever the system requires is available through the outlet on the wall. Then there’s this innovative plug called a smartplug that can upgrade conventional appliances, lighting, and any other electronic device into smart devices. Power is unlimited, steady and metered—but in order for the system to be operational, a power cord must be connected to the grid. Another way to think about this is through the economics of abundance.

A system that runs on batteries has a limited store of power. Concepts like standby power, active power use and sharing a limited resource start to come in to play. Batteries need to be recharged and eventually replaced. Active battery life must line up with human cycles of sleeping and waking; working and living; active and passive use. Tilt the battery to a slightly different angle and you can see the economics of scarcity.

The desktop computer was made to be plugged in. Not much has changed there. The hardware and the software assumes unlimited commodity electricity from the environment The first laptops were built for portability, they were easy to move from one outlet to another. The battery’s low capacity resulted in limited usefulness as a un-tethered device. Over time the hardware of the laptop began to change to accommodate the limitations of the battery, but the software was unchanged. It was crucial that the laptop run desktop software without any alterations.

Adobe’s Flash makes an interesting case study for this analytic technique. Flash was built to operate within the plugged-in system of the desktop computer. As such, it moved easily and naturally to the world of laptops and netbooks. In the world of battery-powered devices it shows its roots. It begs the question of whether something built to use power as an infinite commodity can be altered to operate in an environment of finite power. Faith in a Moore’s law-like increase in capacity holds out hope that these kinds of applications can be merely altered. As long as they can conserve just enough power, they should be able to operate successfully in a large finite energy environment. Another way to ask this question might be: is reform sufficient, or is revolution necessary?

It’s with mobile computing devices built from the the ground up like the iPhone and iPad that battery life has been extended to up to 10 hours. That’s a span of time that begins to be available for complex relationships with the rhythms of life. Software for these devices is also built from the ground up to operate within a restricted power environment. Among other things, mobile computing means a device unrestricted by a power cord.

The battery introduces an era of limits against the infinite constant of the electrical outlet. It’s worth taking a moment to consider how something like electricity, water or natural gas could be converted into an assumed resource of the environment. Imagine if any of the plugged-in appliances in your home had to be re-engineered to work on batteries. Would they need to change incrementally or radically?

In 1978, James Burke debuted a television program called ‘Connections.’ It was billed as an ‘alternate view of change.’ The first episode looked at how a vast technical network had become deeply entangled with every aspect of our lives. Burke thought one way to put that entanglement into relief would be to turn the network off, and then review the effects. To accomplish this Burke created a re-enactment of the 1965 blackout of New York City and the entire northeast of the United States.

Not surprisingly, New York needs to be plugged in, it wasn’t designed to run on batteries. This sent Burke on a quest to find out how we arrived at this point. While we can create artificial scarcity through economic incentives and punishments in the billing for electric power use, these efforts take place within a context of an infinite power supply. There’s always the option to pay more for more power. Contrast that with a battery, no matter how much money you have, your battery will drain at the same rate as the next person’s.

The move from desktop to laptop to tablet/handheld traces an evolution from the infinite to the finite. It also traces a line from the finite contents of a hard disk to the infinite contents of the Network. The cloud computing factories that supply the endpoints of the Network are in the process of being retooled. Heretofore they’d just been plugged into the grid like everything else. Now the grid is positioned as backup power and the Network factories are plugged directly into the the standing reserves of the earth. Natural gas is transformed into electricity through local power generation. This isn’t a transformation from outlet to battery, it’s the substitution of one form of outlet for another.

The photograph of the earth that Stewart Brand put on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog made plain the finitude of our planet. There is no infinite reserve of power behind the outlet on the wall. As we continue to build out the electronic Network environment, at some point, we’ll run up against this limit. Of course, we may have already hit the limit, or passed it long ago. But like the space battles in our science fiction films, we expected to hear a great crashing noise as the limit was reached. Surely there would be some sort of sign, some gesture from the earth letting us know that we’ve exceeded our allowance. But as the poet Milosz reminds us, worlds end, and sometimes no one notices.

A Song On the End of the World
by Czeslaw Milosz
translated by Anthony Milosz

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.

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Going Orbital: Content and its Discontents

Published May 22, 2011 by cgerrish

The image is an arresting one, content orbiting around a new center of gravity. Cameron Koczon, is his essay Orbital Content, addresses what he sees as a new breed of bookmarklet: Instapaper, Svpply and Readability. These applications allow a user to extract content from its original location—and then copy and transmit it to a personal archive. With Instapaper and Readability this may involve using a bookmarklet on a desktop-based web browser to DVR a long-form article from a publisher’s web site for later consumption on an iPad. With Svpply, it may be extracting a favorite item from an online eCommerce site to create a cross-domain curated scrapbook stream that’s shared in a social media context. Content exists as free satellites, plucked from their originating orbits and placed into a personal orbit.

The bookmarklet application occupies an interesting space. It sits at the edge of a desktop application—the browser—and operates on “pages” requested by the browser from servers on the Network. Rather than simply creating a shortcut to a specific URL, the bookmarklet is javascript code that runs on the current page. Because it holds this outside position, it can mix together code from multiple domains, blending the intentions of the page publisher, data or snippets from other sources, and the intentions of the user. In the case of “orbital content,” the bookmarklet is the transport mechanism, the user pushes a button and specified content is instantly transported from the orbit of one sun to another. Koczon’s enthusiasm about these new bookmarklet-based services begs the question whether browserOS apps can gain awareness in the popular imagination.

While the idea of a new orbit is quite exciting, we still seem to be stuck with the word “content.” The very word “content” has engendered a certain amount of discontent. It turns the fire of the written word into a bland abstraction. It’s the equivalent of a factory that turns out “widgets.” It’s the sausage that’s ground through content management systems. When speaking of this new orbital stuff, content seems exactly the wrong word. Content is the thing which is contained—the stuff inside of the boundary. In the case of orbital content, we are not content. The word “content” also refers to a state of happiness—being content. There’s a sense of acceptance of conditions or circumstances, of acquiescence. In neither sense of the word can this new orbital stuff be called content. We do not acquiesce to its circumstances—we break it out of its container and pull it into a new orbit.

We treat the digital as another kind of analog medium. Since it can simulate anything, we extend the analog by simulating it with the digital. In vain, we then attempt to impose the natural boundaries of analog economics onto the digital. By stamping these limitations onto the digital, we put it into analog clothes and ask everyone to behave accordingly. To mass produce significant quantities of “identical” analog objects requires an industrial-scale factory. An identical digital object is forged each time a request is made to a web server on the Network. The original bits aren’t transported from here to there, copies of the bits are distributed to anyone who asks—production is reproduction, presentation is representation.

This is major Tom to ground control, I’m stepping through the door
And I’m floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today
Here am I floatin’ ’round my tin can far above the world
Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do

Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles, I’m feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go

The digital can be passed by reference or by value over the Network. The first preserves the integrity of the data, always pointing back to a single source—pointers rather than copies of bits are passed around. An updated source doesn’t require an updated pointer. A source could change incrementally, or totally, and still employ the same pointers. The second method begins the process of entropy, time-stamped bits are copied and sent, but once out on the wire, their link to the source is broken. An updated source marks a difference with the distributed bits. When the source changes, the distributed copy inscribes a historical state of the source. With every incremental change to the source, the difference in the distributed copy grows.

The kind of copying done in the practice of orbital content is digital rather than analog. Traditionally, the value of a copy has been in its completeness and exactitude. A factory that turns out widgets that sport too much variance is said to have a quality assurance problem. When Instapaper copies, it copies the pointer for exactness and then only a portion of a web page. The digital can make wholes out of any parts—there’s a legible boundary between every one and zero. It can be compared to harvesting a food crop, the ears of corn are gathered and the stalk and roots are discarded. To a publisher, this is a description of stripping the business model from the editorial.

The publisher asks the digital to behave as previous mediums always have—ink, once it is imprinted on paper, has a permanent presentation. Television programs are broadcast and the screen passively plays them. We can take a pen and draw a mustache on a photo in the newspaper, or mute the sound of our favorite television show while the commercial plays, but there’s a higher bar to clipping out segments and reusing them for our own purposes. Analog forms of automating the process have proved too costly and cumbersome.

All the while we thrill and lament the rush of traditional media toward the digital, we still tend to view it through analog glasses. The web page as delivered from the server to the browser is meant to define an end point. The code is delivered and ready for presentation. The static page is given a sense of flow and time with AJAX-based page updates from backstage, altering the presentation in memory through manipulations of the document object model (DOM). The practice of orbital content takes the page, not as an endpoint, but as an input to a process. Shedding their analog clothes, the digital bits making up the page show themselves not as an ending, but as a potential beginning. Using Instapaper, I pipe a designated section of the page, the story I’d like to read later, to my reading room where it’s poured into the format I prefer for reading electronic documents. I define a new endpoint, but it could also be a potential starting point as some portion is shared in another context.

In general, the browser application space (bookmarklets) has made significant strides, it’s gained a cross-platform software infrastructure with Phil Windley’s event-driven scripting language, KRL (Kynetx). And Apple has taken Readablity and Instapaper seriously enough to incorporate similar functionality into the forthcoming browser operating system in Lion. This follows the historical pattern of fundamental features being absorbed into the infrastructure of the host platform. The larger picture is that “web pages” are now both machine readable and scriptable for individuals, something known to the spiders at Google for a long time. No need to wait for the so-called semantic web, the hooks are already there.

David Gelernter defined an alternative to the desktop metaphor called LifeStreams. Instead of named files in folders, inside of folders, inside of desk drawers—nothing needs to be named, things just appear in context in a time-stamped stream. Streams can be filtered by different contexts, organized in time rather than space. Future events put into the stream eventually pop up as something occurring today. With Facebook’s newsfeed, Twitter’s stream, the various photo and location services, we’ve become accustomed to dealing with ranked lists and time-ordered streams. Even the output of these new orbital content services generally takes the form a of stream. In other words, orbital content isn’t really orbital either.

But the metaphor is enchanting enough to do the thought experiment, to take the stream and bend it into a circular shape, an orbit. Timelines are one way of expressing time, but we also have a long history with circular time. We live through hours, days, weeks, months, seasons and years. These things we DVR for later, might actually take the shape of satellites circulating in a personal orbit. Sort of like editing and layering loops, but using more than digital samples of music. What goes around, comes around—imagine orbital content as orbiting content.

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Ironic Architecture: The Audience And Its Double

Published May 2, 2011 by cgerrish

My eyes trace the curve of a jet black line as it snakes across the paper. There’s a point at which the line stops and my eyes keep going, tracing the trajectory of where the line might have gone. It’s within the bounds of that short distance that we travel into the future. It’s this tracing that doesn’t trace anything that is the subject of this meditation.

“and now I can go on,” is the phrase Wittgenstein used to describe a certain relationship to a series. Given “2, 4, 6, 8, 10,” I think I can see where things are going. “Even positive integers” is a possible answer, but no matter what numbers come next, a logic can be found for it. If the number is 12, that’s one sort of logic; if it’s 22, that’s another. Based purely on the visible, the adjacent invisible can always be colored in with a reasonable pattern.

It turns out that perception works in a similar way. The gaps in our apprehension of the world are bridged, filled in, to create the sensation of the smooth flow of time and experience. We project ourselves into the future. And our memories make liberal use of sampling to construct a rational narrative to account for the dramatic beats of our lives occuring before this one.

While past is not necessarily prologue, if you have enough data on what ‘usually happens’ you can make an educated guess about what will happen next. Through a statistical analysis of big data, the trajectory of partial behavior can be made visible, and the completion of that behavior can be projected. Correlations in the data emerge to tell a story that is unavailable to any one individual. Here the life of the human becomes actuarial, a set of probabilities for the possibilities. Once the percentages of the probabilities have exhibited some durability, casino economics can be installed to manage the risk and profit from these tendencies. The owners and operators of big data systems have a private view into a higher-dimensional phase space. And despite what these organizations tell us about good and evil, they are purely commercial enterprises.

A big data interlude: capturing big data on the Network, used to be the province of spiders. In the search business, it was only through expedition, return and accumulation of pointers and meta-data that a sufficient store of big data could be created. With Twitter and Facebook big data is created second-by-second within the walls of a single location. It’s the users who do all the traveling, sending postcards and pointers back to the archive.

As the probabilities solidify, another landscape emerges—along with the building materials for another level of architecture. For instance, using the tendencies that behavioral finance has uncovered, Thaler and Sunstein suggest building architectures that frame choice in such a way that people are ‘nudged’ into getting with the program. The program might be putting a percentage of one’s salary into a 401k to fund their retirement, or selecting a healthy lunch at the school cafeteria. We tend to accept the default and choose the item put in our path. Sunstein and Thaler call this activity ‘Choice Architecture‘ because while an individual is free to make any choice, the selection set is tilted toward a particular policy agenda. This tilting toward a particular outcome is what they call “a nudge.”

I like to call it “Ironic Architecture,” because while any choice can theoretically be made, the character in this little story is unaware of the manipulation and tilting of the selection set. When the character accepts the nudge and acts as the statistical analysis suggests they might, another level of the story is being played out.

Here’s Fowler’s Modern Usage on irony:

“Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware of both that more and of the outsider’s incomprehension.”

While we make a big show of talking about how we want to engage the rational needs and desires of a user in the networked hypertext environment, more and more we’re seeing choice architecture employed to win without fighting, to persuade without engaging in a rational discussion.

This kind of strategy plays out in a number of domains, in politics, it’s called framing, or a little more obscurely, heresthetic:

“Like rhetoric, heresthetic depends on the use of language to manipulate people. But unlike rhetoric, it does not require persuasion. ‘With heresthetic,’ according to Riker, “Conviction is at least secondary and often not involved at all. The point of an heresthetical act is to structure the situation so that the actor wins, regardless of whether or not the other participants are persuaded.”

Personal behavior data is being created and recorded at an ever increasing rate. The phrase ‘information exhaust’ is an apt description of the continuous inscription of our activities into digital media. And while we may think that some superior form of personalization will be available to us based on this large data set, it’s more likely that big data will yield correlations and trends that are built into our environments and make us characters in stories of which we are unaware.

Harry Brignull has coined the phrase ‘dark patterns’ for this kind of architecture. Brignull writes eloquently about Alan Penn’s lecture on the architecture of Ikea and how consumer movement through that environment results in the unfolding of a singular story that its characters are unaware of:

“What Ikea have done is taken away something which is very fundamental, evolved into us, and they’ve designed an environment that operates quite differently, given that we are forward facing people, embodied […] from the way it would happen if you just looked down from outer space. Its effect is highly disorienting.”

“Ikea is highly disorienting and yet there is only one route to follow. […] Before long, you’ve got a trolley full of stuff that is not the things that you came there for. Something in the order of 60% of purchases at Ikea are not the things that people had on their shopping list when they came in the first place. That’s phenomenal.”

The best minds of our generation are designing dark patterns to entangle us in a story in which we spend more than we intend. They’re also designing choice architectures to get us to save for retirement, eat a healthy diet, get immunizations and show up for school. But the conversation and the narrative is happening at a level we don’t have access to—rhetoric without argument.икони

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Sense and Nonsense: You are not the User

Published February 28, 2011 by cgerrish

Thought I’d engage in a little dancing about architecture, a pursuit that has been compared by some to writing about music. But to get to architecture, and here I’m really referring to networked computational communications systems on whatever technical stack, I’ll make an initial move toward the user. And in particular, some thoughts about the practice of user-centered design.

Just as with the concept of ‘usability,’ the words ‘user-centered design’ now simply mean ‘good.’ As in, ‘For this project, I’m looking for a usable web site created through a user-centered design process.’ The user is the customer and the customer is always right. You might be given to think that the user is a person, a human being—someone like you and me. But you’d be wrong. Users are constructs of the system of use, they have no existence outside of the system.

The user experience (UX) world is beginning to realize that while it may seem like they’re crafting experience for humans, networked business systems don’t actually care about humans. Frankly, they don’t know what a human is. On the other hand, they have well-defined formulas to compute return on investment. If there’s ever a question between achieving a business goal and a human goal, UX designers are learning the issue will always be decided in favor the the business. In a sense, there’s not even a decision to be made.

Why then, do we hear so much about user-centered design in the world of corporate web site construction? Putting customers first seems like the right thing to do. And, of course, they do it because they care. The question is, what do they care about?

When a system refers to ‘user-centered’ design, it’s really asking for an optimization of what the system defines as a user. On its surface it sounds like a transfer of authority from the system to the user, but ‘user-centered’ simply means that friction in the transaction interface should be reduced to the point that the user’s inputs are within the range of responses the system can accept as parsable. The system isn’t actually able to respond to the what the user, as a human, wants.

In some sense, the goal of user experience (UX) design is to limit the incidents of users speaking nonsense to the system. In the old days, users could simply be rounded up and sent to re-education camps where they would study thick manuals that would instruct them on how to stop speaking nonsense to computer systems. These days the system must provide immediate feedback and a short learning curve to move the user from spouting nonsense to crafting inputs that are parsable by the system. These small corrections to the user’s behavior makes the user a more efficient gadget, as Jaron Lanier might say.

If enough users speak the same nonsense to the system, a pattern is recognized and the system is moved to assign this new nonsense to a well-defined function of the system. But, in general, it’s the system that will train the users to utter the appropriate nonsense. As David Gelernter notes in an interview with Der Spiegel about the Watson system, all human input into computerized systems is nonsense. These patterns of nonsense are assigned meanings within the system of relations of the machine. The system doesn’t know who you are, doesn’t know what words are and doesn’t know what you mean by them.

SPIEGEL: But let’s assume that we start feeding Watson with poetry instead of encyclopedias. In a few years time it might even be able to talk about emotions. Wouldn’t that be a step on the way to at least showing human-like behavior?

Gelernter: Yes. However, the gulf between human-like behavior and human behavior is gigantic. Feeding poetry into Watson as opposed to encyclopedias is not going to do any good. Feed him Keats, and he will read “My heart aches, and a drowsing numbness pains my senses.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? When a poet writes “my heart aches” it’s an image, but it originates in an actual physical feeling. You feel something in the center of your chest. Or take “a drowsing numbness pains my senses”: Watson can’t know what drowsy means because he’s never fallen asleep. He doesn’t know what pain is. He has no purchase on poetry at all. Still, he could win at Jeopardy if the category were English Romantic poets. He would probably even do much better than most human contestants at not only saying Keats wrote this but explaining the references. There’s a lot of data involved in any kind of scholarship or assertion, which a machine can do very well. But it’s a fake.

If computer systems don’t understand humans, how do humans have an influence on systems? The humans who program the systems have a big influence prior to the point where the system is embedded in a business model. The other point of influence is via the system of laws in which the computer system is embedded. For instance, there are laws about security breaches, the use of social security numbers and zip codes.

And so we come to the dancing about systems architecture. The big corporate backend systems that have been exposed to the Network weren’t conceived as occupying a connected space. It was the rise of Java, XML and web services that created the connectors to put the big iron on the Network. The fact of connection changes the system at the margins, but not in its core.

The big web systems like Google, Twitter and Facebook have built big data repositories that allow them to rent out the correlation data. Google and Twitter in particular have simplified user interaction to the point that there’s basically one action—type and submit. But the center of power remains with the data correlation store. That’s what makes the train go. Doctors are beginning to look at the big data available about their patients and wondering whether they’re treating the data or the patient. Of course, the data will survive regardless of the outcome with the patient.

Changing the balance of power may be a long time coming, and as some have noted, it will need to be baked into the architecture from the start. There are a few new approaches that begin to move in a new direction. Jeff Jonas’s G2 rig combines elements of John Poindexter’s original design for Total Information Awareness, the Privacy by Design principles and Jonas’s own previous systems that do sensemaking on big data in real time. Particularly notable is the system’s ability to course correct based on every new piece of data and to hide the human-readable facet of data through anonymizing and encryption. Other architectures move toward establishing the user as a peer (P2P), in particular Searls’s VRM, Windley’s KRL, Bit Torrent and the recently departed Selector.

A true user-centered design practice will probably have to start on the user’s side of the glass, establish the user as a peer, and not be architectural in the way we’re used to. It’s only in this environment that a possible economics will take root. It’s also here that a developer and designer would finally have standing to do user-centered design. We might hope that such a move would happen because it was right, true and good, but this kind of dance may require a platform that isn’t a platform.

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