The End of Cyberspace

Another reminder of the physicality of computers

Legend has it that when ENIAC, the first digital computer, was switched on for the first time, it drew so much power from the Philadelphia electrical grid it caused a brownout. Since then, computers— and supercomputers in particular— have always been significant consumers of electrical power. For the next generation of supercomputers, operating at petaflop speeds and working on things like detailed climate models, power consumption could represent a significant limiting factor. As Electronics Design Strategy reports,

In an irony of this environmentally conscious era, the supercomputers used to study issues such as climate change themselves impose a significant carbon footprint—consuming megawatts of electricity both directly and for the elaborate cooling systems that are required to deal with the excessive heat they generate. Even so, scientists wishing to tackle leading-edge research need 100× to 1000× more computing throughput than today's high-end systems can provide.

Scientists at UC-Berkeley and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center have proposed a new supercomputer design "using millions of low-power embedded microprocessors instead of conventional server processors," which is projected to use a fraction of the power of previous supercomputers. As Berkeley Research News explains:

To develop a 1-km cloud model, scientists would need a supercomputer that is 1,000 times more powerful than what is available today, the researchers say. But building a supercomputer powerful enough to tackle this problem is a huge challenge. Historically, supercomputer makers build larger and more powerful systems by increasing the number of conventional microprocessors — usually the same kinds of microprocessors used to build personal computers.... [A] system capable of modeling clouds at a 1-km scale would cost about $1 billion. The system also would require 200 megawatts of electricity to operate, enough energy to power a small city of 100,000 residents.

The proposed Berkeley-Tensilica computer, in contrast, would "consume less than 4 megawatts of power and achieve a peak performance of 200 petaflops." According to Electronics Design Strategy,

The joint effort will focus on massively parallel designs featuring large numbers of processor cores connected via optimized links.... Each core dissipates just a few hundred milliwatts while churning out billions of FLOPS, representing an order-of-magnitude improvement in FLOPS per watt over traditional desktop or server processor chips, according to Tensilica. A supercomputer harnessing millions of such cores, tightly integrated at the chip, board, and rack level, will achieve the exascale goal within a power budget of "a few megawatts."

Paper Spaces: Visualizing the Future

I'm going to Oxford this summer for the workshop on imagining business. I'll be talking about "paper spaces," the large, often room-sized roadmaps, timelines, and other documents the Institute uses in its workshops.

I've put a PDF of the paper online; I may experiment with putting a copy on Google Docs, and using Zotero to manage the citations (though that seems iffy, given that I often write pretty long footnotes). Whatever environment I use, the piece is like to undergo substantial revision over the next couple months, as I know there are a couple parts of the argument I want to expand. Here's the introduction:

This article is about paper spaces: room-sized maps, timelines, and charts used to develop, record and share ideas. When used in collaborative work, paper spaces support both focused, creative activity—the creation of a strategy roadmap, the outlines of a software development project, etc.—and informal social goals, like the development of a sense of community or common vision. These are essentially very large pieces of paper, but the term "paper spaces" (the term is borrowed from computer-aided design ) highlights several things. First, we're used to thinking of things made of paper as physical objects whose qualities help shape the experience of reading, but it's useful to pay attention to their spatial and architectural qualities as well. Large visuals aren't just things: they're spaces that possess some of the qualities of desks or offices. IFTF workshops exploit their scale and physicality to promote social activity between workshop participants. In this case, the spatiality of paper is fairly self-evident; but many of our interactions with paper, books, and writing have a spatial quality. Scholars could gain much by analyzing print media using conceptual tools from architecture, design, and human-computer interaction, as well as literary theory and book history.

Second, studying paper spaces help us understand the role that visualizations play in contemporary organizations. Historians have used studies of visual media and visual thinking to expand our understanding of science, technology, and other fields. The business world is supersaturated with visualizations—everything from advertisements, to PowerPoint presentations, to org charts, to brands, to workflows and flow charts—and studying those images could bring similar benefits. At the same time, it warns us against taking too passive or formal a view of visual tools in business, of treating them like paintings on a wall. In the way users interact with them-- they're annotated, extended, argued over, and played with-- they're more like Legos than landscapes. The process of creating maps, and the maps themselves, both reflect a set of attitudes about how to understand and prepare for the future, one that emphasizes user involvement, and the need for actors to develop and possess shared visions of the future. Finally, the term "paper spaces" highlights their hybrid, ephemeral quality. They work because they're simultaneously interactive media and workspace, but their lives are brief and easy to overlook: they are designed to support idea- and image-making, but leave little trace of themselves.

To illustrate how paper spaces work, this article will focus on their use in a specific context: in expert workshops and roadmapping exercises conducted at the Institute for the Future (IFTF), a Silicon Valley-based think-tank. The article begins with an overview of information spaces, and a brief look at IFTF's local culture and research practices. Next, it looks in detail at our expert workshops and facilitated exchanges, and describes how they're organized, what they aim to accomplish, and how they work. It then discusses how paper spaces support the co-creation of knowledge about the future, and a sense of group solidarity. Finally, it argues that paper spaces are ubiquitous: most of our interactions with texts and other media have a spatial dimension that affects the ways we read, think, and create.

The piece is currently a relatively svelte 5000 words long; I figure it'll hit 6000-7000 before I'm done. There are two big things I still have to do.

First, I have to build out the discussion of how working with (or in) paper spaces generates group solidarity, or a sense of common identity and purpose among participants.

Second, I hadn't planned on doing this, but my experience working with ZuiPrezi has made me think I should make explicit something I had planned to leave implicit: that the paper spaces I describe will become extinct in the forseeable future. When I was in Malaysia, I used ZuiPrezi in one of my workshops, and it was a terrific experience; and it leads me to believe that we're not far off from being able to replicate most, if not all, of the social functionalities of paper spaces in digital, projected tools. Thinking about what has made paper spaces work well has been essential for making them obsolete, and I think I'm going to add a section explicitly laying out what a digital system has to do in order to work as well as paper.

Technorati Tags: displays, end of cyberspace, facilitation, Kitchen Budapest, materiality, media, paper spaces, workspaces, ZuiPrezi

BlackBerry ban at a New York law firm!

At a recent Institute for the Future conference, Mike Chorost remarked that devices like the BlackBerry are basically designed to give us ADD, and one of the challenges we face in the future is to design tools that aren't quite so disruptive or addictive. In that vein, ABA Journal reports that a New York law firm as banned BlackBerries and smart phones in meetings.

A law firm in suburban New York City has banned electronic devices from major meetings to prevent distractions caused by cell phones and BlackBerrys.

The six-month-old "no-device policy" at the Long Island law firm of Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein & Breitstone is intended to prevent even vibrations from incoming calls and e-mail messages from interrupting the flow of business....

At routine meetings, new guidelines allow participants to bring electronic devices but require them to step out into the hall when an essential call or e-mail demands an immediate response.

According to Newsday,

The "no-device policy" came about, says partner Ira R. Halperin, as the steady buzzes and vibrations signaling a new call or e-mail were increasingly interfering with meeting-goers' focus.

And you're not fooling anyone by trying to unobtrusively thumb out a response as you hold your BlackBerry under the table, says Halperin, co-head of the corporate law group, who admits to having been quite an offender himself.

At Slate, law blogger Philip Carter comments,

In my practice, and my work in/around government, I've seen this problem too. Big time. I'm certainly guilty of excessive BlackBerry usage. I even have colleagues (including some at Slate) who read their BlackBerries and thumb out messages while driving—a massive risk for them, and for their companies who may be held liable for anything that happens while they're reading/sending work e-mail.... I think we've gone too far—and that the quality of our counsel actually suffers because we are moving too fast and responding too quickly. We need to slow down.

Technorati Tags: attention, communication, mobility, psychology, ubicomp

We don't read the robot TO you, we feel the robot AT you*

One of the things I've come to realize in the course of this project is how rewarding it can be to look closely at humans' interactions with computers, mobile devices, and other technologies. Cyberspace, I'm arguing, made sense in a world in which getting online was hard, and there were clearer behavioral divides between the everyday world that we inhabit naturally, and the online "world" that we visited via computer modem. Today, things like the cellphone, iPhone, and Intel's new Mobile Information Devices, combined with the proliferation of wireless networks and always-on services, are all eroding that sense of the digital world as something separate from regular life.

Today I saw another example of how changes in the ways we engage with technologies can break down conceptual divisions-- this time involving the divide between people and robots. New Scientist reports on a project by Georgia Tech researchers Ja-Young Sung and Rebecca Grinter that examines how people interact with the Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner. Apparently a lot of owners give their Roomba a name, dress it up, or even take it on vacations:

"Dressing up Roomba happens in many ways," Sung says. People also often gave their robots a name and gender, according to the survey... which Sung presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference earlier this month in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Kathy Morgan, an engineer based in Atlanta, said that her robot wore a sticker saying "Our Baby", indicating that she viewed it almost as part of the family. "We just love it. It frees up our lives from so much cleaning drudgery," she says.

Sung believes that the notion of humans relating to their robots almost as if they were family members or friends is more than just a curiosity. "People want their Roomba to look unique because it has evolved into something that's much more than a gadget," she says. Understanding these responses could be the key to figuring out the sort of relationships people are willing to have with robots.

Until now, robots have been designed for what the robotics industry dubs "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs, like welding cars, defusing bombs or mowing lawns. Even the name robot comes from robota, the Czech word for drudgery. But Sung's observations suggest that we have moved on. "I have not seen a single family who treats Roomba like a machine if they clothe it," she says. "With skins or costumes on, people tend to treat Roomba with more respect."

So as they move from environments that we don't like into places that are more familiar, and from doing work we hate to work we just dislike, two things happen to our perception of robots: their social status goes up, and they become more familiar. But this doesn't just happen with robots who are doing "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs: humans who are doing those jobs can develop bonds with those robots, too.

US soldiers serving in Iraq and interviewed last year by The Washington Post developed strong emotional attachments to Packbots and Talon robots, which dispose of bombs and locate landmines, and admitted feeling deep sadness when their robots were destroyed in explosions. Some ensured the robots were reconstructed from spare parts when they were damaged and even took them fishing, using the robot arm's gripper to hold their rod.

Figuring out just how far humans are willing to go in shifting the boundaries towards accepting robots as partners rather than mere machines will help designers decide what tasks and functions are appropriate for robots. Meanwhile, working out whether it's the robot or the person who determines the boundary shift might mean designers can deliberately create robots that elicit more feeling from humans. "Engineers will need to identify the positive robot design factors that yield good emotions and not bad ones - and try to design robots that promote them," says Sung.

This is not to say that we're starting to think of robots as more like people, but at least we're starting to treat them a little more like, say, pets: they're not us, but they're still part of our emotional lives, and we have some appreciation for what they do for us.

(* A reference to Stephen Colbert's great description of what would make his show different: "Other shows read the news to you. We feel the news at you.")

[To the tune of Mono, "Lost Snow," from the album "Ex Plex, Los Angeles, September 24, 2005".]

Technorati Tags: design, end of cyberspace, HCI, psychology, robotics

Touchless remote

Lovely prototype from B&O of a "touchless remote."

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace

Write Room and Skype

Recently I've been using a couple tools a lot, for reasons that are worth noting (worth it to me, anyway). Increasingly, I find my choice of technologies depends on fairly small and specific things, keyed more to the way I'm able to use them than to functional specs.

The first is WriteRoom. I've had it for a while, but I've now made it my default basic text editor. The interesting thing about WriteRoom is that it revives an old interface for a new purpose: it turns it into a tool for focusing an author's attention. This is writing without distraction, the Web site promises.

Walk into WriteRoom, and watch your distractions fade away. Now it's just you and your text. WriteRoom is a place where your mind clears and your work gets done. When your writing is complete, exit WriteRoom and re-enter the busy world with your work in hand.

With so much e-mail and information pouring in, the digital life we lead can sure be a blur. If you've found it getting harder to focus on the words you want to write, if you've forgotten how great it feels to really write distraction-free, then let WriteRoom help you rediscover your muse.

Of course I find the spatial metaphor interesting.

But what I find I really like about it is that it's particularly well-suited for writing late at night. I have these regular bouts where I'm up until 2 or 3 at night writing-- periods when I can really get a lot done, or have those conceptual or organizational breakthroughs that every writer finds really satisfying. Most of the time I'm not writing something that requires elaborate formatting or layout, so I can use a simpler writing tool. But when I'm in bed, the lights are out, and I'm trying to work without keeping my wife up, the amber lettering on a black screen seems especially fitting. The amber and black screen are gentler on the eyes. They focus attention on the words at a time when I don't have much energy, but have some of my best ideas.

The other tool I'm using a lot these days is Skype. Of course, I have lots of ways to talk to people-- two cell phones (one used mainly for text messaging), but I'm finding Skype really good for work-related calls, for a couple reasons.

First, I just bought a headset, which has made it possible to walk around while talking. Before I had it, I had to lean over the computer and yell into the microphone (wherever it is on my computer), which is not a superior communications experience. With the headset, on the other hand, the sound quality is excellent, and I can get up and move about. Much better.

Further, when I'm working, I'm never at my desk-- I don't even have a desk-- but I'm always at my computer. (When I'm not working I'm also often at my computer.) Since I actually lost my office phone a long time ago, it's a lot easier to do calls through Skype.

Finally, the combination of talking and texting makes it possible to share notes with the person you're talking to, pass URLs back and forth, etc. Since I generally have to send a follow-up e-mail after any phone conversation, having the ability to write those notes in real-time is really useful. And since Skype can save text threads, you can use it as an archive of previous conversations. That's really useful for things like weekly conference calls, which I'm now doing with some Oxford students I'm advising on a project.

History of personal productivity tools

Could you track the history of our relationship to computers through the history of personal productivity or personal tracking tools?

Here's what I mean. Twenty years ago, with the first generation of personal computers, a "productivity"-related piece of software might have been a calendar or list app-- something fairly generic, and probably business- or work-related. It would have borne a resemblance to business productivity tools, and would often have been used to help manage our working days.

These days, though, the list and calendar is something you can take for granted (though integrating multiple calendars is a pain). But the category of productivity tools hasn't disappeared: it's changed. Lifehacker's list of New Year's resolution management tools, and Make Use Of's list of "online services to help you out with your daily life and new year resolutions," both point to them becoming more intimate and proactive: you can use them not just to track when you have that meeting with Ted, but you can track what days you exercised and ate right-- and you can share that information.

So when did the first personal productivity applications appear? When did dieting or weight management programs appear?

Their appearance and proliferation suggests two things. First, it's yet another data-point documenting the ever-greater integration of personal computing into our personal lives. Second, this category is worth watching because the big trends in this space seem to be increasing automation-- both in receiving information from users, and in sending out alerts and such-- and continuous engagement-- they're not things you sit down with very few weeks, like Quicken, but ideally would be systems that you would use when making decisions about what to eat, how far to run, etc.. You can start to imagine how powerful these programs could become when you access them through mobile devices-- or when they access you through those devices, ten minutes before you're scheduled to go to lunch, or just before you exit the freeway and pass the gym.

Technorati Tags: health, personal management, productivity, software

Check

Atul Gawande has a terrific article in last week's New Yorker on an information technology that, after several years' testing, looks like it could transform intensive care. It's mainly been used in the reduction of line infections, which Gawande explains are

so common that they are considered a routine complication. I.C.U.s put five million lines into patients each year, and national statistics show that, after ten days, four per cent of those lines become infected. Line infections occur in eighty thousand people a year in the United States, and are fatal between five and twenty-eight per cent of the time, depending on how sick one is at the start. Those who survive line infections spend on average a week longer in intensive care.

This new technology was developed a few years ago by Johns Hopkins professor Peter Pronovost. After the first trial using it in a hospital,

The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital... [it] had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.

For years we've heard that information technology could solve some of the most tractable problems with our health care system, and this seems to make that promise true. So what is this technology?

A checklist.

Not a gigantic database, or RFID tags in unconscious patients, or steerable needles (which boffins at UC Berkeley are now working on); but pieces of paper listing the steps you're supposed to take when doing something. You know what they are.

So why are they good-- good to the point of being able to save lots of lives and millions of dollars in an average hospital? Checklist offer

two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Pronovost was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions. In a survey of I.C.U. staff taken before introducing the ventilator checklists, he found that half hadn’t realized that there was evidence strongly supporting giving ventilated patients antacid medication. Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance.

Tools like checklists aren't just accidental media containing information; when you look at how they're used, they turn out to be aids to memory, objects that help standardize what can be chaotic practices. Under some circumstances, they're tools for diffusing practices and raising standards.

The power of checklists rests in their simplicity, particularly the simplicity of their use. Documents behave predictably. That predictability, I would argue, in turn is important for its incorporation into work practices. With a checklist, you can easily see that steps have been followed: it's a bit like how strips of paper in air traffic control centers serve as tools for tracking who has responsibility for a plane.

Donald Norman on predictability in devices

From an article on Donald Norman:

[D]espite two decades of lectures from Dr. Norman on the virtue of “user-centered” design and the danger of a disease called “featuritis,” people will still be cursing at their gifts this Christmas.

And the worse news is that the gadgets of Christmas future will be even harder to command, because we and our machines are about to go through a rocky transition as the machines get smarter and take over more tasks. As Dr. Norman says in his new book, “The Design of Future Things,” what we’ll have here is a failure to communicate.

“It would be fine,” he told me, “if we had intelligent devices that would work well without any human intervention. My clothes dryer is a good example: it figures out when the clothes are dry and stops. But we are moving toward intelligent machines that still require human supervision and correction, and that is where the danger lies — machines that fight with us over how to do things.”

You can’t explain to your car’s navigation system why you dislike its short, efficient route because the scenery is ugly. Your refrigerator may soon know exactly what food it contains, what you’ve already eaten today and what your calorie limit is, but it won’t be capable of an intelligent dialogue about your need for that piece of cheesecake.

To get along with machines, Dr. Norman suggests we build them using a lesson from Delft, a town in the Netherlands where cyclists whiz through crowds of pedestrians in the town square. If the pedestrians try to avoid an oncoming cyclist, they’re liable to surprise him and collide, but the cyclist can steer around them just fine if they ignore him and keep walking along at the same pace. “Behaving predictably, that’s the key,” Dr. Norman said. “If our smart devices were understandable and predictable, we wouldn’t dislike them so much.” Instead of trying to anticipate our actions, or debating the best plan, machines should let us know clearly what they’re doing.

Reflections on my N95

Yesterday I broke my Nokia N95 super-phone. Today I packed it up and sent it off to Nokia repairs... in Huntsville. Not the first place I'd think to send a phone to be fixed, but hey, if it was good enough for Werner Von Braun, it's good enough for cell phone repairs.

I hope the experience of getting it fixed is better than than the last one I had when I needed to have a phone repaired. As I realized then, good repair service may seem like one of those things that a company should invest in if it can get around to it, but it actually really matters for today's intimate devices:

A cell phone repair isn't something that requires lots of precision machine work and soldering: you pop open the unit, swap out a circuit board, close it up, and move on. The actual diagnosis/repair/testing cycle probably takes 5-10 minutes (anyone who repairs cell phones and has better numbers, please feel free to comment).

Nonetheless, for whatever reasons it takes months for phones to move through the local store-telco-repair shop ecology. And from talking to other people in the store, it seems that my experience isn't unusual: other, less persistent people have waited for 4-6 months for their phones, and showing up in person to plead for news of their repairs-- like going to the prefecture's office for a visa to leave Casablanca-- now seems to be the norm.

This matters because bad repair service could inhibit the growth of the kind of always-on, pervasive, ubiquitous computing and communications that lots of futurists (and more than a few electronics and cell phone companies) see as just over the horizon. Many people already develop deep, personal relationships with their cell phones; I feel naked if I leave the house without mine. As we invest more in customizing them, and acquire phones that have a larger and larger number of features, bad service is going to feel more and more wrenching, and those loaner phones-- which are always old returns-- will be more and more unsatisfactory.

I hope it's more like my recent experience with Canon, when I got my SD-630 fixed.

Having the camera-- I mean phone... or whatever you call an N95-- out of my life for a few days gives me a chance to reflect on how I've used it.

First, it's not quite a device that can replace all my other devices-- I usually leave the house with a cell phone, camera, and iPod-- but it's a lot closer than I expected.

I've long been skeptical of the concept of the single device that replaces lots of specialized devices. One objection has been about performance quality: cell phone cameras generally aren't as good as cameras, and I've not been willing to make the sacrifice.

Another is that my various devices have different, and contradictory, design parameters. I want a measure of solidness in a camera that I don't need in a cellphone. A cellphone ought to be light, but still stand up to abuse. A camera doesn't have to be heavy, but it should still feel dense and rugged; and the materials and detailing that you use to achieve that aren't appropriate for a phone. And neither cellphone nor camera aesthetics are appropriate for an iPod.

But if I didn't already have these other devices, and wasn't already accustomed to being a little fussy about them, I suspect I'd be perfectly happy with just the N95. The camera isn't quite as good as the SD630, but for most everyday purposes it's really everything I need. Likewise, the MP3 player function isn't quite as good as the iPod, but I can put in enough memory to store a few hundred songs (and, by constructing a smart playlist, choose some songs that I rate highly but haven't played in a while, and songs that I listen to a lot).

Interestingly, I find that performance issues aside, there are things I miss in the N95-- but they're different, depending on whether I'm using it as a camera or an MP3 players. When I'm using it as a camera, I really miss having a wrist strap. (The times I've not used the wrist strap on my camera, I've either dropped it in the ocean, or dropped it on Gloucester Road.) When I'm using it as an MP3 player, I miss the scroll wheel.

The thing I really love, on the other hand, is Lifeblog. Being able to take a picture of something and blog it immediately (or put it on Flickr) is great. Some of the posts admittedly have been a tad frivolous, but I've been able to post pictures to kids opening their advent calendar gifts seconds after they're open. I don't imagine that I've got relatives hitting the "refresh" button every morning; what's good is that it eliminates procrastination and delay on my part. But I expect that the next time I got somewhere that has lots of free wifi spots, I'm going to be photoblogging in more or less real time. I did something like this during my trip to Budapest, but with a phone that can go online, I could really go to town.

[To the tune of John Lennon, "I'm Losing You," from the album "Working Class Hero: The Definitive Lennon (Disc 2)".]

Technorati Tags: N95