The End of Cyberspace

Where's my paperless office?

[Reposted from my Red Herring blog, 2005.]

Whatever happened to the paperless office? A decade ago, futurists and pundits were confident that personal computers, CD-ROMs, and the Internet would render books and magazines obsolete, turn paper money and checks into curiosities, and bring about the paperless office. Of course, none of these predictions has come true. Books and magazines are still around, and while total paper use has declined in the last couple years, offices use more paper now than before personal computers became commonplace.

What this suggests is that the relationship between the paper and electronic worlds is more complicated than we first thought. On its own, this is hardly surprising: it's a truism that we overestimate the magnitude of technological changes in the near term, and underestimate them in the long run. But understanding why early predictions about the death of paper haven't come true will help us map out some of the possible futures of paper in the coming age of pervasive computing. This is a world in which computers are small and cheap enough to be embedded in virtually any built object; information can be associated with everyday objects and places; and networking technology allows devices to communicate and cooperate on behalf of their owners.

If paper was supposed to be made obsolete by the personal computer, what future could paper have in a world in which computers fly off the desktop and are everywhere, in everything?

Smart home, smarter home

[Reposted from my Red Herring blog, 2005]

When modern architecture emerged in the first years of the last century, it threw down a gauntlet at the feet of traditional neoclassical and academic architecture. Modernism's style was stripped-down and functional. It celebrated the beauty of machines and the art of engineering, and expressed itself in concrete and steel, rather than brick and wood. Most important, it declared that the future would never again look like the past: from now on, architecture would be about innovation and change, not about working with timeless principles and eternal proportions.

Implicitly at first, and then consciously, architectural exhibits became predictions. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion house, first exhibited in 1927, exemplifies how modern architecture backed into the futures business. The Dymaxion house was a hexagonal structure, suspended from a central load- and services-bearing column. Virtually everything in it was made of aircraft-grade medal. The house wouldn't be built on-site, like traditional houses; instead, it would be mass-produced, like cars or cans of peas, and delivered to owners.

Soon "the home of the future" became a stock element of every architectural exhibit, World's Fair, forward-looking corporate display, or popular magazine special issue. (Even World War II couldn't derail them: a 1943 brochure showed a couple admiring a neighborhood of modern houses under the caption, "After total war can come total living.") Sporting automated kitchens, robot butlers, furniture that you washed with a high-pressure hose, and helipads (the long, sad story of why we don't have personal helicopters or jet packs will have to wait for another time), these houses were sleek temples of convenience, promises of a world in which the home would be as frictionless and worry-free as a department store.

Of course, almost none of this has come to pass. Instead, the "home of the future" projects serve as textbook examples of how you can get the future wrong, and why.

Paper Spaces talk

The Oxford conference talk version of my "paper spaces" project is now viewable on ZuiPrezi, the presentation system I've been playing with and really like.

I've got extensive blog posts about the trip and conference on my personal blog.

conference, paper spaces, Oxford University

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

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.

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

Cisco opens up: How is this novel?

The Mercury News has an article about Cisco's new open plan offices:

Like other valley stalwarts, including Intel and Sun Microsystems, Cisco is casting aside the cubicle culture that has thrived in the United States since the late 1960s. In its place, the company is embracing a new workplace design that saves space and money, and encourages collaboration among co-workers.

Cisco is not the first to forsake the cube. Younger companies such as Google and VMware have created open office spaces that still retain assigned seating. But as the valley's largest employer - and with 6 million square feet of South Bay real estate - Cisco's decision reflects a push for efficiency and a trend that emphasizes the bottom line.

"It's a competitive world," said John Scouffas, principal and designer for Gensler, the San Francisco-based architectural firm that's been redesigning workplaces in valley companies, including Cisco's. "Collaboration has been shown to spark innovation and speed product to market."...

[C]ubes are becoming dinosaurs.

"Cubes have had their day," said Michael Joroff, senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Architecture + Planning. "They were established at a time when work was done head down, by yourself. More and more, work is collaborative."

Clearly, the trend is gaining ground. Gensler architects confirmed they are also working with Intel, Intuit, Hewlett-Packard and Network Appliance. Already at Sun, about 56 percent of the workforce, or about 19,900 employees, work without assigned office space.

There's nothing wrong with the article per se, but haven't these arguments in favor of open space been around since at least 2000?

Technorati Tags: architecture, Silicon Valley, work, workspaces

Quote of the day

"My office isn't a space in a building. My office is the space where I am." (Rhett Livengood, quoted in a Mercury News article on open space offices)

Technorati Tags: architecture, office, workspaces

Constructing the scholarly habitus

A little while ago, Kevin Kelly suggested that the habit of sitting at desks might be "a short-term anomaly" that we would abandon in the future. This got me thinking: what is the ergonomic history of writing and thinking? Five hundred years ago, what kinds of spaces did philosophers or essayists construct for themselves; how were they furnished; and how did they work in them? There are lots of pictures of scholars or saints at work-- Saint Jerome in his study and all that-- but how idealized are those? How well do they reflect what scholars actually did?

I asked Anthony Grafton what had been written on the subject, and he suggested, among other works, Gadi Algazi's 2003 article, "Scholars in Households: Refiguring the Learned Habitus, 1480–1550." It's a really excellent piece of work, and it'll resonate with anyone who ever writes within sight of children's toys, or revises articles on nap drives. (Perhaps it's no coincidence that Algazi's Web page mentions that he has three children!) Here's the abstract:

Until the fifteenth century, celibacy was the rule among Christian scholars of northwestern Europe. Celibacy was a major element of the codified cultural representation of the scholar and his specific way of life, sustained by peculiar institutional arrangements and daily routines. Founding family households implied therefore a major reorganization of the scholar’s way of life. Broadly speaking, this involved refashioning the scholarly habitus (understood as a system of durable and transposable social dispositions), redefining social relations, and developing the necessary material infrastructure. The paper focuses on three aspects of this process during a period characterized by uncertainty and experimentation. It discusses the structure of scholars’ families, arguing that at least until the middle of the sixteenth century, received models still persisted, while new viable models for articulating family reproduction with the transmission of scholarly dispositions had not yet crystallized. It then turns to the reorganization of domestic space, focusing on the different uses of the study to manage social distance and regulate domestic relations. Finally, among the different manifestations of the scholarly habitus, it argues that the emotional detachment of learned men was itself a learned habit. The well-documented discussion of competing options for organizing scholars’ family households and cultivating an acquired nature in academic settings provides an exceptional occasion to examine the way a group habitus is reshaped and to explore the cultural work involved in this process.

Of course, there's Dora Thornton's The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy, which I've encountered a couple times, but never looked at with this particular subject in mind.

There's also some work on commercial and mercantile calculation and writing. I think Alfred Crosby talks some about this in one of his books, and of course there's JoAnne Yates' Control Through Communication, which is full of interesting detail on 19th-century business information practices.

Technorati Tags: history, history of science, workspaces, writing