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Category: interaction design

No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better

Published November 4, 2007 by cgerrish

Samuel Beckett

A link tossed in to the stream by Joe Tennis on Twitter, stirred up thoughts about failure. Joe’s pointer was to a blog posting on the process of creating computer games, and the ideal of setting up an environment where failure can happen faster and isn’t punished. That’s a unique idea in this day and age.

It brought to mind a quote from a late Samuel Beckett novel called “Worstward Ho.”

Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.
Samuel Beckett

If you intend to participate in a creative profession, whether it’s writing fiction, making paintings or plays, creating companies, products or software— you’ll need to learn to live in, and with, failure. In a sense, success is the failure that we’ve made an accomodation with. We shoot for perfection, and we always fall short. Dave Winer summed it up in 1995 in his motto for Living VideoText — We make shitty software, with bugs. Software must ship prior to perfection, in that way it’s like life. We must live our lives prior to perfection. If we wait, we’ll miss everything.

Failure is tied to risk. If failure is not an option, risk is not an option. If risk isn’t an option, only a very small kind of success is possible. The principle is the same as an investment portfolio. You can banish risk, but you can’t expect a high level of return. Risk is a requirement of potential high return. The same is true in any creative pursuit, if you want a big success, you’ll need to learn to live with risk and failure.

And not just live with them, but to call them friends. Learning how to fail faster means learning how to succeed faster. Creating a safe environment for failure encourages risk taking and exploration. It gets you there faster. But just as with success, not all failure is equally successful. Failures need to be crafted just as carefully as successes. Just ask Samuel Beckett…

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Intertextuality: the digerati and the literati

Published November 1, 2007 by cgerrish

Books

The New Yorker has an interesting article about the future of reading, library and books. There’s a quote by Kevin Kelly that caught my eye:

“all the books in the world� would “become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas.� The user of the electronic library would be able to bring together “all texts—past and present, multilingual—on a particular subject,� and, by doing so, gain “a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don’t know.�

This exposes the gap between the digerati and the literati. The idea of the a “single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas” is called intertextuality and was introduced into the conversation by Julia Kristeva.

Kristeva referred to texts in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author and reader of a text, and a vertical axis, which connects the text to other texts (Kristeva 1980, 69). Uniting these two axes are shared codes: every text and every reading depends on prior codes. Kristeva declared that ‘every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it

While the digerati dream of a liquid, hyperlinked super document living on Web servers, the literati know that texts are connected on many axes. And the connections are not simple links, they contain politics, power, poetic and gender influences— they shade meaning.

Texts are always already connected, but literal connection in a super hypertext document could make implicit links explicit. But will explicit links also expose the influence of the linking? As with all software, it’s not about the code, it’s about the user. In this case, the locus of meaning, the only really important connections, are in the mind’s eye of the reader.

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Attention economy and the economy of attention

Published October 29, 2007 by cgerrish

Old_Televison

With Hulu entering beta the decentralization of television continues. Kara Swisher thinks it might actually work. Broadcast television can still create a mass audience around particular programs, but the model of showing a episode once at a fixed time is rapidly breaking down. Of course it started with multiple cable channels, but has been excelerated by services like “OnDemand,” iTunes downloads and soon, Hulu. The economics of the business are still based on aggregating an audience’s attention, selling that attention, and showing them commercial messages. Payment for downloads or views is still a secondary revenue stream.

The other side of the coin is the economy of the user’s attention— human beings don’t scale. Just because there are more and more programming and activities available doesn’t mean that an individual can consume them all. Google became important when the internet became too large to easily find what you were looking for. Look for the emergence of channel editors, this blog edits YouTube, and other video sites, and picks out a few interesting videos for your entertainment. I can see this happening at sites like Dogster and Catster, car enthusiast sites, and any community website. I need to be able to program my own channel, and view edited channels of content editors I like. Oh, and it’s about multiple media types, not just video.

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Not A Keyboard, But an Amazing Simulation

Published October 26, 2007 by cgerrish

Flat Apple Keyboard

Taking the torch from Xerox Parc, Apple has lead the field in taking the general computer user beyond the traditional input devices. Graphic User Interface, the mouse, the touchpad, and most recently multi-touch. The direction is a bias against the mechanical for human/computer interaction. Apple decided against a mechanical keyboard for the iPhone, and it looks like they’re continuing in that direction with this patent filing. Unwired View makes the filing a little more understandable.

The keyboard becomes a software environment, and that opens a world of possibilities. We’re very early in this game, and currently the mechanical keyboard is much more usable than the various virtual keyboards out there. We prefer the tactile feedback, but that’s the challenge Apple appears to be tackling. How do you put a beautiful simulation of the act of typing on the glass?

The current form of human / computer interaction via KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) has been an unnatural configuration from the start. It’s always been about the needs of the machine and the network. It’s only through the expansion of interaction modes that the current configuration of computing can be de-centered and distributed into a ubiquitous set of new devices. The iPhone is a tentative first step on that journey.

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