Wall

What is a wall?

Its fundamental principle, of course, is division. Here from there, inside from outside, yours from mine. In Latin, the very word for “city” originally refers to the stones of its walls.

A wall needn’t be very much at all. Sometimes, indeed, a wall is little more than a line drawn in the air - think of the velvet rope outside an exclusive club.

Where they are more substantial, though, they tend to be conveniently vertical, and thus suitable for the presentation of imagery to members of an upright species with forward-facing eyes. We have always used walls to store and convey information, whether that meant telling stories, marking time, spreading the word, or remembering the fallen. (Lest we forget, they’ve also quite often been used to further somewhat less noble pursuits.)

Without coming anywhere close to being comprehensive, we can specify that walls contain, exclude, defend, bolster, even create.

If we are truly in an age when bits rule over atoms, then surely our walls are becoming virtual as well. What will we choose to do with them…and what can we expect them to look like?

Welcome to the monkeyhouse

What the hell is wrong with this man? What is he, like, eight? “Wowee, wowee, I got to ring the bell!”

In stereo!

Two more-than-usually intelligent interviews with me are freshly up: Fabio Sergio’s, for the Convivio network, and Christina Ray’s for Rhizome. Both of ‘em made me think, and I hope you dig them as well.

What a difference a word makes

If you have any particular investment in the field of interaction design, Andrew Otwell’s review of Bill Moggridge’s would-be juggernaut Designing Interactions is a must-read.

I haven’t myself bought Designing Interactions yet, curiously enough because my superficial scan of the cover led me to the same conclusion that Andrew arrives at in the course of a reasoned and judicious review: that the talent assembled in this book seems like little more than a roster of Bill M.’s buds and IDEO stalwarts. (As the owner of two of IDEO’s previous forays into published self-promotion, not to mention a pretty but fairly pointless deck of Method Cards, I figured I’d give this one a pass.)

But Andrew also turns up a deeper reason to resist, or at least question, the Moggridge book, which is the paternalism that he sees encapsulated in the book’s very title. There is, after all, a certain arrogance in presuming that one can “design” an interaction; the review contrasts this to the “humility” implied in Dan Saffer’s fine Designing for Interaction, which sets limits on what a designer can achieve, regardless of his or her ambition. (Full disclosure: I’m one of Saffer’s interviewees.)

As Andrew notes, the distinction is crucial, and it’s all in that little word “for.” I’m not sure it’s fair to impart this stance to all of Moggridge’s subjects - after all, they presumably had less than no say in what the book would be entitled - but it’s telling that they all do seem to belong to the generation of the Apple Lisa and the original Palm Pilot.

There seem to be other serious problems with the book’s interview-driven approach, but I’ll let Andrew speak to them; it wouldn’t be proper for me to do so, not having read it myself. And given that one of my main complaints about the discipline of user experience is its (OK: our) ahistoricity and marked tendency to reinvent the wheel, I’m glad that this book exists as a record of subjective experience, whatever its other flaws - in many ways, it sounds like the Studs Terkel take on user-centered design, v1.0, and that’s not at all a bad thing.

Along the lines of my longstanding contention that experience cannot be designed, though, I would hope that we’ve learned by now that there are real limits on the power of a designer to shape and influence interactions. Judging, again, solely from Andrew’s review, this isn’t a note I hear sounded in the Moggridge book, and that’s really too bad.

What goes around

If you get a chance, do yourself a favor and take in Our Daily Bread. The feature-length documentary is a gorgeously and rigorously uninflected look at the world of globalized food production, from fisheries to salt mines to slaughterhouses - something, I imagine, like the film a hybrid offspring of Andreas Gursky and Frederick Wiseman might produce.

There’s no narration, no framing, no explanation or contextualizing or narrative arc. It’s not Fast Food Nation, in other words. All that you’ll get out of this film is what you bring to it. Its scenes of plastic-membraned, greenhoused acreage stretching to the horizon, crouching croppers working under (and at the pace of) a moving harvester vehicle, and mechanized, electrohydraulic and fully Taylorist abattoirs (this last highly reminiscent of Wiseman’s classic Meat) may not even be meant to give one pause…but they do.

I’ll tell you this much: we found ourselves, for once, laughing nervously about our post-cinematic hunger. Highly recommended.

Quote I wish I had to hand when writing Everyware, or: Plus ça change

Norbert Wiener, from Cybernetics: Communication and Control in Animal and Machine:

Those of us who have contributed to the new science of cybernetics thus stand in a moral position which is, to say the least, not very comfortable. We have contributed to the initiation of a new science which…embraces technical developments with great possibilities for good and for evil. We can only hand it into the world that exists about us, and this is the world of Belsen and Hiroshima. We do not even have the choice of suppressing these technical developments. They belong to the age. [...] The best we can do is to see that a large public understands the trend and the bearing of the present work, and to confine our personal efforts to those fields…most remote from war and exploitation. As we have seen, there are those who hope that the good of a better understanding of man and society which is offered by this new field of work may anticipate and outweigh the incidental contribution we are making to the concentration of power (which is always concentrated, by its very conditions of existence, in the hands of the most unscrupulous). I write in 1947, and I am compelled to say that it is a very slight hope.

A profoundly pre-Foucauldian read on “power,” to be sure, and almost achingly naive in so many ways - but oh boy can I sympathize.

My beef with virtuality

I think my well-known resistance to the idea of Second Life and other environments of its ilk comes down to the curious costlessness of so many choices made there.

Dig this big crux: in virtual environments, use doesn’t happen - not in the everyday sense of wear and tear we know so well from the real world. You and twenty of your closest friends can congregate in a house, and not degrade it in the slightest. Nobody spills wine on the carpet, nobody has an unnoticed smear of pigeon shit on the back of their trouser leg, nobody stands uncomfortably close to you.

This (feature? bug?) of such environments strikes me as a refusal to engage with everything problematic and intractable about actuality, and that’s why I continue to regard them as fundamentally adolescent. They’re like the world, with all the potentially uncomfortable parts smoothed over. Difficulty is life.

Revenge effects writ large

Reading this BLDGBLOG summary of a recent NYT piece on China’s long reach into Africa, I couldn’t help but be reminded of this quote from Richard Preston’s 1994 The Hot Zone:

The paving of the Kinshasa Highway affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War.

This paragraph has and will always send literal shivers down my spine - not so much for what it says about Africa, or even about the abstract act of clearcutting a highway right-of-way through primeval forest, but for what it implies about the downstream and unforseeable consequences of such acts. (Preston is, of course, talking about the emergence of AIDS from its original animal reservoirs in the rainforests of Kenya; I give some context in a v-2 post from 2003, here.) I can only wonder what all those Chinese engineers are even now setting loose, in their own acts, in the logistics and infrastructure set up to support them.

Waiting for the gift of sound and vision

Met Allan from the mighty Core77 today for lunch at Fanelli’s, to catch up but also to discuss one or two plans for collaboration we have in the works.

Apropos of said plans - and not to give too much away - I’m wondering if there are any NYC-based sound engineers reading this who would be able to help me set up an acceptably high-quality recording environment. Drop a line if you’re interested; I’m sure we’ll find a way to make it worth your while.

And for the record, Fanelli’s serves up a mean burger. (The bun, especially, was a marvel of flaky goodness.) The joint is a tenacious survivor of the old Cast-Iron District, miraculously holding its own amidst the bustle and fabulousness of latter-day SoHo, and it’s a lovely place to seek a little coziness against a day suddenly turned slate-grey and chilly.

A proper welcome

One morning you wake up and have had enough. You’ve had enough of fighting an outdated CMS, you’ve had enough of a heavy and equally outdated design, you’ve had enough, even, of the rhetorical corners you’ve from time to time painted yourself into.

Mercifully, the world affords us an infinite number of outbound routes, and each a way and a chance to reinvent. Welcome to Speedbird.