Thank you, Google, for THE KU24 UNIVERSAL GRINDER. And such good value, too…

Somewhat close to a joke isn’t it. You say to someone you know, do you know the time, and they say yes. And then they look at their watch. You can sort of challenge them well, did you really know the time when you said yes? They’ll say “yeah, I knew how to get the time” and I think that’s often what we do mean when we say yes, we know things, we know how to get them from our long term memory, from some reliable environmental resource, from wherever.

The artist’s sketch pad is kind of more interesting I think because for certain forms of abstract art there’s actually some detailed psychological work out there showing how, if you like, looping your ideas out onto paper enables you to perform kinds of reorganisation on the ideas that you can’t perform in imagination. That’s a good case because the abstract artist certainly thinks that that their creation, they may be prone to commit what I call the “Naked Brain Fallacy”, to create a nice piece of abstract art and then think hey, my brain did all that. But no, those loops into the outside world play a crucial role in the genesis of these products that we take to be just our intellectual products, expressions of ourselves.

Andy Clark, interviewed on Australian radio, 18 May 2003.

Where I’m trying to get to with Smart Spaces/Discreet Computing, is something with the intimicy of Andy’s wristwatch example, and the affordance of Marcos Novak’s Liquid Architecture:

A liquid architecture is an architecture whose form is contingent on the interests of the beholder; it is an architecture that opens to welcome you and closes to defend you; it is an architecture without doors and hallways, where the next room is always where it needs to be and what it needs to be. It is an architecture that dances or pulsates, becomes tranquil or agitated. Liquid architecture makes liquid cities, cities that change at the shift of a value, where visitors with different backgrounds see different landmarks, where neighborhoods vary with ideas held in common, and evolve as the ideas mature or dissolve.

Marcos Novak - Liquid Architectures, in Cyberspace: First Steps

I’ve been working for a while to turn some of the things I talk about here into a more coherent document — part monograph, part marketing tool for what ku24 does.

From the introduction:

Digitally-mediated communications are now essential to creative businesses. However, the wholesale adoption of desktop-centric personal computing has created new challenges for organizations whose success depends, fundamentally, on social interaction and creative collaboration?too often, the digital tools brought in to assist workflow and communications have instead obstructed genuine collaboration.

This whitepaper suggests a radical framework for change, exploiting recent development in social network analysis and emerging communications technologies to restore the primacy of interpersonal communications to the creative workplace.

You can find a draft in PDF format here on the ku24 site.

If you have any feedback, please let me know.

My favourite coffee-shop suddenly has an open wifi gateway. Happy Happy. Listening to Sole’s Selling Live Water on The Continual and drinking a decent latte. Sometimes things work out. I’ve been off in the real world for a while, working on turning some of the recent posts from here into a more structured document. Will upload a draft here soonish.

As reported by David Weinberger in his book Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Edward Tufte once said:

Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

Well, he would, wouldn’t he. Co-incidentally, he’s also just written a thinkpiece (monograph?) on the Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, which is also available from the above site.

[CAVEAT: This is a work-in-progress, attempting to build a framework for my recent thoughts about digitally-mediated working environments. More to come.]

Social networks are at the heart of creative business. During the ’80s and ’90s, progressive businesses responded to this (relatively obvious) insight through workplace innovations. Hot-desking, freeform physical environments and mobility were intended to provide opportunities for project teams and communities of practice to self-organise. At the periphery of these task-based clusters, it was also possible for serendipitous interactions between people and teams who would not otherwise come into contact. Tight clusters, peripheral interactions.

However, at the same time that creative businesses were tearing down office walls, these businesses became increasingly dependant on PC-mediated communications and workflow processes. At best, exploitation of roaming profiles and ‘portable identity’ freed workers from the need to lug their laptops, power supplies and cables from desk to desk. At worst, whole businesses fell victim to the Curse of the Exploding Tamagotchi.

But unnoticed by most, personal computers engendered a deeper malaise — no-one noticed the gentle sucking sound of attention being relocated from real-world social context to the screen.

Hence the question: how do we ‘only connect’ the realworld social networks at the heart of creative work with the behind-the-screens systems which provide those networks with information and connectivity. The need for electronic mediation is real — especially for businesses operating in multiple locations and time zones. But the issue is how to maximize the connection between people, and minimize the attentional suction of screen-based interfaces.

Once attention is seen as a valuable resource, different attentional needs and opportunities can be identified. Consider when, why and for how long information needs to be visible.

Some suggestions:

• Investigate the contexts in which communication is both relevant and important. Pitch help and new business requests have a different window of importance than updates on existing accounts, and require a different attentional commitment to accrue useful responses on the part of their recipients.
• Develop systems which are both portable and In Your Face, which do not absorb attention, but are instead responsive to a timely glance. Adoption of pocketable, always-on devices like Blackberry helps with this. Such devices allow important systems to receive continuous partial attention, rather than sucking attention wholesale into an on-screen environment.
• In Your Face interfaces can be developed for more traditional computing environments, so that again a glance will suffice to keep people informed and in contact, and allow the centre of attention to be where it should be, off-screen. Move from the metaphor of desktop and overlaid application windows, where possible, to something like the ‘control surfaces’ used in music production studios, where everything important is visible immediately at the top level of the interface.
• Think hard about where information lives — in hearts and minds. Instead of the conventional attempt to codify snapshots of knowledge states in systems which must be navigated into and moused through — consuming attention in the process — build lightweight systems which link knowledge-holders together so they can communicate directly with each other. Exploit consensual surveillance to capture valuable information, and use agent systems to get this information back to users when it’s relevant.
• Exploit the ‘presence’ information available in Instant Messaging so that people know when their correspondants are actually available and willing to talk, rather than blindly firing emails off into the ether with no knowledge of the attentional context of the intended recipient. This is not only more polite, it is more likely to open communication channels when correspondants are receptive and willing to share their valuable knowledge and attention.
• Use social network mapping tools to analyse email and Instant Messaging logs to see who is actually talking with whom. Monitor usage over time to see if and how the above recommendations are actually changing the social organisation of your business.

A cautionary tale from the 1990s:

With the best will in the world, and love in its heart, a progressively-minded business gave all of its employees Apple Mac laptops. This was both a sign of trust and respect, and an early attempt at truly mobile working. But laptops are fickle, and creative people are prone to save all their work locally and then accidentally leave their Mac in the pub, or to have their laptop accidentally crushed by elephants while on a location shoot in Africa. It all started going horribly wrong. Everyone felt both loved — in response to the benifience of their employer, who had gifted them such a useful tool to use as they would, and terrified — that their work depended on an unreliable, fragile piece of kit which required insanely careful care and feeding. The resulting, unarticulated, cognitive dissonance led to short tempers, much insecurity and not a little shouting. Eventually, the problem was diagnosed as The Curse of the Exploding Tamagotchi — the giving, in good faith, of technology which actually leads to nothing but frustration and dissapointment: half tamagotchi: requiring of regular care and feeding, and half hand grenade: likely to cause havoc and destruction if mis-handled.

The Curse of the Exploding Tamagotchi is not a historical curiosity. It is a repeating pattern, which is often difficult to identify in time to avert its worst ravages.

Be inspired: Alan Kay at Etcon this year…

We should think about children. The printing revoltuion didn’t happen in Gutenberg’s day, it happened 150 years later, long after Gutenberg was dead,when all the people alive had grown up with the press.

A small minority of Gutenberg’s contemporaries *got* the printing press, but it wasn’t until they were dead that the children who grew up with the press were able to put the ideas into practice

[...]

This stuff is better than anything in our handhelds today. We could implement it from they papers they wrote then, but no one reads the papers that were written in the 60s.

Seymour Papert proposed that kids would learn differential geometry on wireless laptops in the 60s.

We’ve gone through a couple generation of kids since the PC and we haven’t taught them anything. We need to put a lot more effort into the systems that we build for kids. Kids are the only people who do two-handed, Engelbart interfaces.

My first real job was writing educational software (and hardcore VAX-based finance systems, rather schizophrenic) at the now long-gone Elizabeth Computer Centre, in Tasmania. Under the visionary leadership of Roger McShane in the 1980s, Tasmanian schools had probably the best networked computer systems of any non-US educational system. Roger had actually worked on the Plato system in the States, and had some interesting stories about the work that Kay, Adele Goldberg and the rest of the Xerox PARC team had been doing while inventing the personal computer. The ideas of people like Kay, Seymour Papert and the other inheritors of the constructionist learning philosophies of Vygotsky were at the core of what we were doing (and have been an enormous influence on everything I’ve done since).

Email persists until deleted, and appears in a time-based sequence. It is the dominant technology for corporate digital communication. But there are roles for media which provide a different attentional context.

Think of all those emails that you were ‘going to get around to dealing with’, that were requests for help from people you don’t work closely with, but which ended up ignored becuase they scrolled off your screen as more urgent or immediate messages streamed in after them. Compare to a news ticker sitting at the top of your screen, with requetss for help intermixed with feed from news services to which you subscribe. Such communcations share an important characteristic — they are items you can deal with in your own time, which exist in a different temporal context to instant messages or emails, which anticipate iimmediate attention and response. Decent tickers support the concept of ‘time to live’ — ticker messages scroll past, constantly updated, until they expire. Until then, they are there, in your peripheral attentional field, waiting for you to choose to read, digest and respond to them, while still remaining, importantly, In Your Face.