The End of Cyberspace

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

Touchless remote

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

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace

Spelling with my hands

I have a strong interest in learning how people's uses of technologies changes the way they think-- or less grandly, how it shapes the way they perform cognitive tasks or approach problems. Recently, I found an example of something I do that's definitely an artifact of my long engagement with a very specific technology: I realized I spell with my hands.

The other night, my wife and I were at the dining room table, each of us working on stuff. (Since she's a teacher at a pretty demanding school, she often has papers to grade in the evening.) She asked me how to spell a long word. I thought about it for a second, and couldn't just recite the letters, even though I was sure I knew how it was spelled. So I typed it.

Of course, I can recite the spelling of plenty of words, but after thirty years of typing, complex spelling is something I do with my hands more than my mind's eye. I know a word is misspelled when I feel my fingers hit the wrong keys, or reverse the order of a pattern. For me, correct spelling is a matter of feeling my fingers move over the keyboard in the right, comfortable way, not a matter of thinking "this word is spelled like this," then translating that into a set of motions. The keyboard has become an interface between the words I know how to spell, and the actual act of spelling them correctly.

This helps explain why I find using the predictive text feature on cell phones a somewhat puzzling experience. On a keypad with predictive text turned on, you really do have to think about the spelling of a word, because you're essentially feeding the phone clues about the word you want it to spell. Hit the wrong number on the keypad, and it's led astray, a sure as giving someone the wrong clue in a mystery will lead them to a mistaken conclusion. What makes it more confusing is that as you hit the keys, the phone may guess a completely different word than it had before; and of course, some keypad combinations can spell several different, equally popular words (46 can be "in" or "go," or a bit less likely, "ho").

For someone accustomed to spelling on a QWERTY keyboard, this is a pretty mystifying interaction. Of course, I'm getting better at it; but writing on a traditional keyboard and a keypad aren't merely different activities in terms of the fingers you use, or the prominence of the thumb versus the other digits; it places different cognitive demands on someone who's grown up spelling with his hands.

Technorati Tags: cognition, end of cyberspace, interface, keyboard, N95

ZuiPrezi

The latest version of the Kitchen Budapest zooming interface/presentation tool, ZuiPrezi, is out. It is fantastic. I can't wait to get my hands on it. Go check it out.

Technorati Tags: Budapest, interface

The decline of the graphical user interface (2): Rise of the command line

One of the arguments I'm trying to develop is that despite the wonderful growth of graphics capabilities in all kinds of places-- my Nokia N95 has nicer graphics than the Mac I had a few years ago-- the graphical user interface is slowly and surprisingly becoming less important in our lives. The interface on my iPod is a bunch of text menus; my cell phone alternates between menus and icons; and I use Quicksilver and Spotlight to find things much more often than I use folders.

Gina Trapani argued a year ago that while the

advent of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) forever revolutionized personal computing... the command line is making a comeback in modern web and desktop applications.

But I don't use the command line, you say. Oh but you do! Let's take a closer look at this surprising "circle of life" right back to the trusty old command line with some examples of CLI in modern personal computing.

I define a command line interface as a single input box that can execute complex operations based on what you type there. The command line isn't only used by Unix beards, Terminal freaks and Cygwin experts; you use it every day, probably several times a day. Case in point: the Google search box....

Application launchers like Windows' Launchy - and what I'd argue is the truest next-generation CLI available, Quicksilver for the Mac - are also leading the charge towards a command line interface.

Gina's is but one of a number of pieces that discuss the revival of command lines-- but also chart some ways in which the modern use of command lines differs from those in old interfaces.

Technorati Tags: command line, end of cyberspace, future, GUI, interface

Ergonomics and the end of cyberspace

This will probably be just a throwaway line in the book, or a paragraph at most, but I've been thinking a bit about RSIs and computer-related injuries as an example of the fractured manner in which we've tried to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds.

Of course, you can injure yourself carrying firewood, herding sheep, wrangling children, or doing a million other things in the real world. But as I understand it, people get RSIs when of two things happen: either when computers (or more precisely, keyboards, mice, and monitors and their relationships to the body) force users to do something that their body objects to; or when computers remove a physical constraint that prevented users from performing the same action for a long time.

This isn't necessarily a problem caused by badly-designed computers. One of my colleagues sent around this bit (allegedly) from the New England Journal of Medicine:

A healthy 29-year-old medical resident awoke one Sunday morning with intense pain in the right shoulder. He did not recall any recent injuries or trauma and had not participated in any sports or physical exercise recently....

[H]e had bought a new Nintendo Wii (pronounced "wee") video-game system and had spent several hours playing the tennis video game.... In the tennis video game, the player makes the same arm movements as in a real game of tennis. If a player gets too engrossed, he may "play tennis" on the video screen for many hours. Unlike in the real sport, physical strength and endurance are not limiting factors.

The problem with the Wii isn't that it makes you do something really unnatural. But in the real world, few of us can play tennis for four or five hours straight; a Wiimote, in contrast, is light enough to make that possible.

There's also some criticism of the new Cisco open office on ergonomic grounds:

The photo of a Cisco no-cubicle office in the recent San Jose Mercury News article set off my alarm bells, however. The no-cubicle environment in the picture is an ergonomic nightmare. I can’t believe the article didn’t discuss this downside to the wonders of the new office.

I called Lisa Voge-Levin, an ergonomic consultant who helps companies design healthy work environments, and asked her to look at the Cisco photo with me.... [She reported that the armchairs, lack of eye-level monitors, and absence of tables for drinks and accessories] contributes to neck and back injuries including muscle and tendon strain as well as such serious injuries as ruptured discs. She also notes that in such an environment, it is hard to control lighting, glare, or noise; all can lead to headaches.

Technorati Tags: ergonomics, Wii

More from Søren Pold, "Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form"

Søren Pold, "Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form," Postmodern Culture 15:2 (2005).

The graphical user interface (GUI) as we know it does not stem from an aesthetic tradition, but from an engineering tradition that has paradoxically tried to get rid of it.

. . .

If the computer and the interface really had become truly invisible and transparent, computers would mingle almost seamlessly with the world as we know it--perhaps making it a bit "smarter." If this were true, digital technologies would probably not have any paradigmatic effect on culture and aesthetics since they would not make a marked difference, but of course reality has proven otherwise, and we can now begin to acknowledge the massive cultural and aesthetic impact of digital technologies.

. . .

What is an interface? The purpose of the interface is to represent the data, the dataflow, and data structures of the computer to the human senses, while simultaneously setting up a frame for human input and interaction and translating this input back into the machine. Interfaces have many different manifestations and the interface is generally a dynamic form, a dynamic representation of the changing states of the data or software and of the user's interaction. Consequently, the interface is not a static, material object. Still it is materialized, visualized, and has the effect of a (dynamic) representational form.

. . .

The interface aims to visualise invisible data. It is a new kind of image originating in an engineering tradition and can be understood as an extension of instruments like radar and scientific tools, which do not represent any analogue image of reality but rather sheer data.11 As formulated by Scott deLahunta, the interface is "more information than likeness; more measurement than representation." Consequently, realism is the dominant representational mode of the interface, even though it is a complex, informational, and postmodern realism.12 In the following, I shall point out three rather different kinds of interface realism: illusionistic, media, and functional realism.

Technorati Tags: design, digital culture, interface

Quote of the day

Søren Pold, "Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form:"

The interface is the basic aesthetic form of digital art. Just as literature has predominantly taken place in and around books, and painting has explored the canvas, the interface is now a central aesthetic form conveying digital information of all kinds. This circumstance is simultaneously trivial, provocative, and far-reaching--trivial because the production, reproduction, distribution and reception of digital art increasingly take place at an interface; provocative because it means that we should start seeing the interface as an aesthetic form in itself that offers a new way to understand digital art in its various guises, rather than as a functional tool for making art (and doing other things); and, finally, far-reaching in providing us with the possibility of discussing contemporary reality and culture as an interface culture.

Technorati Tags: culture, design, digital culture, end of cyberspace, interface

The decline of the graphical user interface (1): Mobile devices

I'm not a Mac fanatic, but every computer I've bought with my own money has been a Mac. I got an SE in 1988, and have gone through various Quadras, iMacs, and laptops since then. Since the beginning much of the appeal of the Mac was the graphical interface. First, it was the only personal computer with a GUI. Then after the appearance of Windows, it was a better version of the GUI: cleaner, faster, more intuitive, or whatever.

I still gravitate to Macs, but I'm beginning to see the outlines of a future in which graphics are really good, but the graphical user interface is obsolete.

Two things are driving the fall of the GUI. One is mobile devices, whose screens are too small to handle the kinds of GUIs we've had on personal computers. The other is the growth of search and tagging tools as an alternative to visual (and often hierarchical) systems for organizing and accessing documents on personal computers. I'll talk about the first here.

Consider the iPod. For all of the attention the neat color screens have gotten-- and they are pretty neat-- what strikes me about the iPod, and the iPod Touch, is how much of the navigation is text- and list-based. Sure, it'll play movies and TV shows, and show you album cover art, and the little screens are surprisingly easy to watch (though I have a much more satisfying time watching things I'm familiar with, probably because my brain is filling in details that the screen doesn't actually show). But you don't use icons to navigate: you navigate through text menus.

I've spent a little time playing with Cover Flow, and my sense is that it really doesn't make the iPod interface less logocentric: it provides an additional piece of information to, for example, help you tell the difference between two different versions of "Midnight Train to Georgia," but it doesn't put you back in a world of folders or desktops.

Likewise, every cell phone has a nice color screen, and some icons that when clicked on will take you to different functions; but again, most of the time, I'm selecting from menus and scrolling through lists. The screen may be pretty, and the color is nice on the eyes, but my cell phone company hasn't tried to create a little information landscape on the phone's screen. Instead, they've gone with menus.

That's probably a smart choice, because menus are probably easier to work through, particularly when you're only giving partial attention to the interface. When I was sitting at my desk, I could focus on icons and folders, but when I'm walking down the street or driving (not that I ever do that), I want something much simpler: looking at simple words, or better yet, one-touch dialing.

Creating devices that let you interact with information while interacting with the world reduces the appeal of interfaces that are themselves little worlds. And I suspect that shifting from situations where we devote the bulk of our attention to graphical interfaces, to ones where we devote fragments of our attention to text-based interfaces, reduces the relevance of the the idea that we're interacting with an alternate dimension of information.

Technorati Tags: design, end of cyberspace, interface, mobility

Wizard newspapers

Previously I've blogged about Harry Potter and the Internet of Things, and argued that the Harry Potter series could inspire a generation of designers and technologists to create devices that behave like magical objects, and further break down the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds.

So I was struck by a ScienCentral News article about a new e-paper that invokes Harry Potter:

Hollywood needs pricey special effects to make Harry Potter's magical world come to life. But one bit of movie magic, Harry's full-motion-video newspaper, may not be so far from reality....

Purdue University's David Janes is using nanotechnology to create a high-tech display that could be used for a newspaper that updates itself, complete with moving pictures.

"So instead of seeing a static picture on your newspaper headline, you would actually see a character talking at you. Certainly I think this would be a way to do that," says Janes....

Janes' group uses transparent transistors containing tiny nanowires to light a flexible screen.

"I guess in my mind the thing that it directly replaces is the thin-film-transistors that would be the actual drivers behind your LCDs, or your plasma televisions," says Janes. "We will no longer be constrained by simply having this rigid, glass panel we hang on our wall or our desk, and we'll be able to wrap displays around other things."

It also happens to be transparent, so manufacturers could be embed it in clear surfaces like windshields, or even your eyeglasses, because everything from the nanowires to the electrodes has been fabricated using transparent oxide materials.

"If you're sitting on a train or on an airplane, you could just watch videos directly through your eyeglasses, and not have a separate display you carried with you," says Janes.

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, displays, end of cyberspace, epaper, Harry Potter, interface