Skip to content →

Category: interaction design

Ironic Architecture: The Audience And Its Double

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

Comments closed

Learning To See At The Edge Of Darkness

Night-vision goggles give you an advantage, you can see in the darkness. There’s a sense in which Google has these goggles for the Network. Google has the most complete map of the territory, and they’ve flooded the map with light. A search engine’s spiders feel their way through the darkness, tracing out the graph of links and nodes, and sending their sketches back home to be pieced together into a larger map.

To most of us, the Network is dark, it’s only through habit or maps that anything can be found. Theoretically, any public node on the Network is reachable, but as a practical matter you can’t get there unless someone gives you a hyperlink. An individual’s map of the the Network consists of the URLs that can be remembered and browser bookmarks. The average Network traveler moves through a fairly well-defined circuit of web sites. The value of a weak-tie social network is that people you don’t know well, but follow, are likely to be carrying links that you, and members of your strong-tie network wouldn’t have ordinarily encountered.

The Network also has a dark side that can’t be mapped by Google, these are the secure pools of data protected from a search engine’s spiders. Bank accounts, medical records and other personal information falls into this category. Unless you’re in law enforcement, you can’t Google someone’s financial records. We call this kind of darkness privacy. Some say it no longer exists, but last time I checked, I couldn’t Google Eric Schmidt’s checking account or Scott McNealy’s health records.

Facebook is also sheltered from the search engine’s spiders. Google’s spider can’t join Facebook and become friends with all 600 million members so that the contents of Facebook can be added to Google’s map of the Network. A spider is a kind of robot, and robots aren’t allowed to join Facebook. Interestingly corporations are allowed to join, and robots and other kinds of applications can be constructed to operate within the boundaries Facebook. Facebook has created a territory that can only be mapped by Facebook, or from within Facebook. While Facebook is a dark pool to Google, the open Network is available to Facebook. Humans don’t view Facebook as closed because they cross the boundary that keeps robots out with a minimum of friction.

And so we come to the question of darkness and enclosures. If we view the Network as open, perhaps we see a large field of light with pools of darkness at the margins. But for the user without a map, the Network is complete darkness. Thus an argument for an open Network is the equivalent of saying that the map makers must be able to do their work so that we can navigate through the darkness. Allow their robots passage so that they can light the way for us. Although it should be noted we can only navigate to places on the map, uncharted territory remains in darkness. Facebook is un-navigable without the maps provided by Facebook; the open internet is un-navigable without the maps provided by Google. The difference, of course, is that anyone with internet-scale data infrastructure can provide maps of the open internet, while only Facebook can provide maps of Facebook. And while some may perceive a difference in the barriers to entry, it may be a difference without much of a difference.

In the end, the purpose of these maps is to provide you with a hyperlink—a doorway to get you to your desired location. You stop and ask for directions: “How do I get to such-and-such a place?” The search engine replies with two million prioritized results listed on tens of thousands of pages. You might scan the top ten of two million results to see if there’s anything of interest. If Google was really confident in their results, they’d only give you their ten best answers. However it’s the two million results that shed some degree of light on the landscape of the Network. In the end, it’s only a small selection set of hyperlinks that’s needed—one can easily imagine other methods of producing a small set useful of links.

As the map gains more prominence, many attempt to build structures on the map itself. The map provides a boundary, separating the visible from the invisible. For instance, the page must be constructed in a specific way if it is to be findable. What cannot be found, cannot be read. The finding is the thing. For instance, despite the rise of the e-reader, and networked apps designed specifically for reading, these approaches don’t fit into the map. The pages fall outside the method of map construction. It’s in this way that the map serves as a limit, a kind of zoning law, for new construction.

Maps distort the territory, they create an abstraction of a specific layer of the territory for a particular purpose. We can also say that a map never exhausts the territory, there’s always something that remains unwritten on the parchment. Oddly, we can also say that the map always already lies within the territory. There’s no outside of the territory, one doesn’t come to an edge and see a transcendental map maker beyond the clouds. The map is constructed from within the territory to be used to navigate the territory.

The Network’s pools of light and pools of darkness each have their own kind of maps. While some may call for eternal sunshine, with everything standing in the light, always waiting to be seen—it’s in the chiaroscuro that we see unknown figures emerging from the darkness.

How Poetry Comes to Me
Gary Snyder

It comes blundering over the

Boulders at night, it stays

Frightened outside the

Range of my campfire

I go to meet it at the

Edge of the light

ИкониikoniПодаръциикони на светциИдея за подарък

Comments closed

Sense and Nonsense: You are not the User

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.

Comments closed

Opening A New Interaction Surface: Microsoft and Kinect

It’s an unexpected moment for Microsoft. What was formerly called Project Natal, and is now called Kinect, has opened a new interaction surface to the Network. I’m trying to think of another example of Microsoft introducing and providing stewardship for an interaction model with this kind of uptake. Generally Mr. Softy has been a follower, an embracer and extender of pre-established modes.

You can tell that Kinect has connected because it’s immediately overflowed its use cases and taken up residence in a whole series of unanticipated projects. It’s an interaction surface that has corporate competitors starting up their copy machines and trying to find the best position as a fast follower. Somehow it’s hard to imagine Microsoft actually getting something out of their labs and on to the street for around $200.00. I suppose it could be the harbinger of a pipeline finally unclogged. At least that’s the marketing spin I’d put on it.

After an initial misstep, Microsoft seems to have embraced the so-called “hacking kinect” movement. What they seemed to think was new kind of game controller turns out to be a general purpose interaction modality with use cases all up and down the Network. It’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft handles the stewardship of this new device. Running a race from the lead position is an entirely different kind of game.

2 Comments