The happiest of holidays to “all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”
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From the Speedbird monthly archives
Monthly Archives: December 2007
It’s important to underline that everything I am about to say is:
(a) the product of someone thoroughly conditioned by, and accustomed to, a long series of essentially Xerox Star-derivative UIs;
(b) written by someone whose understanding of task and tool is very likely tangent at few points to the perceptual and symbolic universe inhabited by the intended target audience; and
(c) underwritten by a single day’s use of the device in question.
Having said that.
Despite its inclusion of some innovative and useful features, I find the OLPC device’s Sugar operating system poorly integrated with applications (here nicely dubbed “activities”), to the degree that it may well be impossible to evaluate whether the underlying idea ever had any merit. My first impression - and I reiterate, it’s only that - is that many of the applications bundled with the device epitomize everything that’s wrong with FLOSS user interfaces, even when the OS itself has been created by professional information designers.
The indicators of trouble begin the moment you unbox your new device. Ostensibly out of sustainability concerns, the laptop arrives bereft of any documentation whatsoever - save a letter over the signature of Nicholas Negroponte, advising the proud new owner that all the necessary instructions can be found at this URL.
What if you can’t connect to a network in the first place? Tough luck. It’s not quite a brick, but you’re not going to be able to do much of anything at all with the machine. In fairness, of course, the primary scenario of use envisioned by the device’s designers precludes a solitary laptop being unpacked in isolation: there “should” always be at least one other machine within range and able to form a mesh, or at least a trained teacher around to help. Try explaining that to a child, though.
I want to respect the fact that design challenges of this order are extraordinarily complicated, and nothing if not inherently prone to compromise and trade-off. As well, it’s crucial to acknowledge (out of professional courtesy, if for no other reason) that mature designers may make different, but equally defensible, choices at any given juncture. But there are just a ton of bizarre decisions made here, at the physical and interface levels both, and I can’t see any way that they won’t damage the user experience.
Two examples:
- The Sugar OS offers the user three ways to situate and understand the context of their use, three scales of representation hardwired into the UI: Home, Groups, and Neighborhood. These are almost certainly the right levels of abstraction, and even, defensibly, the best choices of nomenclature/labeling. But take a look at the Neighborhood view.
I wonder about the choice to apply a spatial metaphor to the depiction of network access points, when no such spatial organizational schema in fact exists. (Available access nodes are apparently ordered arbitrarily on the screen, each time the Neighborhood view is invoked.) There’s a serious mismatch here between the onscreen representation and the reality of access points, which are, after all, disposed in space around the device and user. If you can’t get a lock on one, the very first thing you want to do is move closer to it; follow this map, and all you’re going to get is frustrated.
- I’m generally a big fan of Yves Béhar’s work with Fuseproject. Historically, he’s had an unerring sense for humane and pleasing form, for finding the warmth in objects whose contours are derived algorithmically. That’s why I simply cannot wrap my head around his choice to closely stipple the XO’s surface. I’m sure it helps little hands keep a grip on the box, but that’s what you do to street furniture, for chrissakes, to keep it from being vandalized. And that’s just exactly how it functions here - except that in context, of course, what’s being prevented isn’t vandalism, but personalization.
Proud owners of new XOs will presumably want to slap stickers on their machines, draw on them, make them their own; after all, that’s what we adults do with ours. Why should kids be denied this very real pleasure…or the additional disincentive to theft that goes hand-in-hand with it?
I’ll leave you with those thoughts for now. I want to get into it really deeply, I do. And I will. Having just committed to the Web two looooong and fairly critical pieces in rapid succession, though, I’m hesitant to saddle you-all with another just yet. Maybe you can just leave your responses in comments, and let me be Good Cop for awhile?
So we’ve reached the end of 2007, and with it the end of my experiment with Tyler Brûlé’s Monocle.
Unlike every other design-minded blogger I know, I’ve avoided weighing in on Monocle until I felt like I at least had a reasonable sense of what the magazine was, and what it aspired to become. With all nine extant issues of the magazine now sitting stacked up in our living room, furnishing me with a fair basis for critical consideration, it’s time to report my findings.
I am sad to say that, in large part, my final verdict comes back in the negative, and not by a little. Since, as a charter subscriber and a longtime admirer of Tyler’s audacity both, I’ve been pulling for the magazine’s success from the beginning, it may be worth looking into just why this state of affairs should come to pass; I’m therefore going to go into some detail in examining my disappointment. (Full disclosure: in the months between its announcement and launch, I pitched Monocle on a story idea, and never heard back from anyone over there. I don’t believe that colors any of what follows.)
If you prefer the thumbnail version, at core all of my issues with Monocle boil down to this iron fact: at £75 annually, I simply don’t feel that my subscription delivers sufficient value for me to want to renew it. But there’s more to it than that, a great deal more.
Why have I come to feel this, about something seemingly so unerringly crafted to suit my own personal predilections, tastes and desires?
- First and foremost: the magazine just never felt essential to me. That is what Tyler promised and that, above all, is what I wanted it to be, or at least contain: a crisp, concise, deeply clued-in briefing on the state of global play, like something a younger, hipper Economist might put together for the front of the book.
I understand that the pace of change being what it is, timeliness is going to be an inherently difficult thing to pull off as a monthly. But currency can be measured in many ways, and one of them is indubitably providing the sort of canny strategic insight necessary to contextualize and properly understand the daily onrush of events in business, politics and culture. This is what I was looking for, not bemused dispatches on the lives of Danish fishermen (issue 07, October) and vintners in the remote Chinese west (04, June).
Not all weak signals are portents of things to come. In the context of Monocle’s value proposition, the desire to report on the under- or entirely unheralded is only as laudable as the degree to which the subjects of these reports eventually signify. Otherwise it’s arbitrary, nothing but whimsy and window-dressing.
- Tyler’s persistent and intrusive Nippophilia has always been a bit much - especially, perhaps, for those of us with some actual long-term experience of living as foreigners in Japan. It was always part and parcel of wallpaper*, but in Monocle he really gave it its head; my own personal tipping point may have been that one paean too many to Tokyo governor, notorious immigrant-basher and avowed “fascist” Ishihara Shintaro, whose recent conversion to green enthusiasms reminds me that there’s nothing at all incompatible between environmentalism and authoritarianism.
There are plenty of things to admire about Japan, but calling things Japanese out for higher praise than you would grant the directly-equivalent Western item isn’t appreciation, it’s fetishism.
Case in point is the magazine’s elevation of Porter luggage to iconic status. Believe me, I know my bags, and I’m sorry, but Porters just aren’t all that. As an owner of two or three, acquired during my years in Tokyo (and at Tokyo prices), I can tell you that they’re unexceptional items made with the mayfly Japanese fashion cycle in mind, not the long haul; treating them like they’re simultaneously blessed with the looks of a Valextra and the durability of a Filson is just silly.
What goes for Porter bags is true of so many of the magazine’s other Japanese enthusiasms. Would Monocle heap nearly so much praise on a Ohioan Tadao Ando, or an Angeleno Tokyo Midtown? In your heart, you already know the answer to that question…and that’s just exactly the problem.
- As the unwonted praise heaped on world-class bad actors like Ishihara indicates, Monocle consistently lacks anything resembling a critical voice. At times it plays at being serious, raising ethical questions about, e.g., Chinese stem-cell research (issue 08, November), only to accept an interviewee’s dicier assertions without follow-up, comment or raised eyebrow. At others, it simply fails to engage the obvious ethical dimensions of what it chooses to report on (the newly-resurgent Japanese military, issue 01, March; Abu Dhabi’s biennial IDEX arms fair, issue 02, April; the Christian retail industry, issue 06, September; an Israeli antimissile system, issue the latest).
The magazine’s relentless focus on high-end consumption as a literal way of life is, of course, itself a major ethical stumbling point, and clearly one whose implications are not engaged in any way other than the superficial acknowledgment of “sustainability” as something to be aspired to in urban design. Your mileage may of course vary, but this strikes me as not particularly cutting it.
- Monocle blurs, like no Western magazine I’ve ever seen, the boundary between advertising and editorial. Advertiser products and services are frequently mentioned in features, reviews and articles, without any indication that there is a business relationship involved. In almost every issue, cross-branded advertorial is delivered in the house design vocabulary, typeface, and copy voice.
Color me naïve, but I find this among the magazine’s most distasteful qualities. (Perhaps it’s another Nippocentric innovation Tyler admires; it’s certainly nothing new to books like Casa Brutus, and marginal callouts like “PANASONIC X MONOCLE” even ape the Japanese convention.) Risibly, the product placement even extends to the (awful) manga, where it stands out like an orangutan with an erection might at, say, an office Christmas party.
- More subtly: over the course of its first year, at least, Monocle evinced a persistent tendency to turn to surprisingly hackneyed “usual suspects” when looking for insight from SMEs. I had hoped that a magazine predicated on its ability to deliver a certain novelty of insight would in turn acknowledge a generational turn in the wellsprings of expertise. Not to name any names, but this hasn’t been the case. Color this one more a missed opportunity than anything else.
- Most seriously, Monocle suffers from serious confusion in the way it positions itself. The book comes across as cloying, precious, and auto-parodizing, not at all, as one recent reviewer would have it, “ultra-stylish and ultra-global.” This is in part for its comically disproportionate attention to things Japanese, in part for its willful hipster-doofus obscurity, and in very large part, because I find thick lashings of name-brand luxury the sure mark of a pathetic arriviste, and not anything to be aspired to.
Let’s strip this down to the basics of social performativity so crucial to both perception and business reality, and you can think of me what you will: on finally receiving my very first, highly anticipated copy of Monocle, I held it proudly cover-outward and for all to see as I walked down the street. I, too, wanted to participate in its fantasy/value proposition of discernment, global reach and access. (OK, I’m sad that way.) But here’s the thing: I no longer wish to do so.
In a mere ten months and ten issues, Tyler Brûlé has, without question, succeeded in one of the most daunting tasks faced by contemporary enterprise, that of establishing a resonant brand ex nihilo. The trouble is that the brand he brought into being says all the wrong things about me and what I value.
I think that about sums it up, on the major counts. Throw in the fact that the ostensible added value provided to subscribers by the magazine’s Web site just doesn’t seem to exist - I’ve visited monocle.com exactly three times in the last twelve months, all apologies to m’learned and admired colleague Dan Hill, who, by all accounts, has tried to do something genuinely novel in his stewardship of Monocle’s online presence - and there’s little to justify plunking down that £75 or equivalent.
Tyler’s to be applauded on quite a few, nontrivial counts: for trying something distinctive, personal and new in the first place; for paying painstakingly close attention to type, paper weight and texture; for pumping new life into one of my favorite words in the English language, “bespoke”; for commissioning pieces that, whatever their ultimate value, undeniably do not tread the usual path; and above all for believing, as I do, that in any consideration of the material, hard-to-quantify things like provenance finally do tell. (Of course, I would believe these things: wallpaper* was a big part of my education in the first place.)
These are all wonderful qualities, but they’re not quite enough to build a business on entire. I’d argue that if I’ve come to feel as I do - as one of a mere 5,000 charter subscribers, and doubly as someone who must to a fairly close approximation reside center-mass of the Monocle audience in terms of taste, vocation, air miles, etc. - then something’s wrong. In this, that piece in BusinessWeek strikes me as getting it just about right: the magazine “is either prescient, or steering sharply toward an audience that doesn’t exist.”
That’s almost on point, anyway. It is, of course, unquestionable that my one data point is insignificant in terms either of Monocle’s business plan, or Tyler’s ambitions for the book. But whether its audience can be said to exist in the absolute or not, it is now smaller by one. Monocle is so far from what it could have been, and my world, anyway, is the lesser for that.
All I can imagine is this:
After a billion years of lonely, straight-line sojourning through the universe, a cosmic ray this morning transected the orbit of Earth. In some tiny fraction of a second, it passed through ionosphere, ozone layer, stratosphere, and Oakland, California, its trajectory flashing through a server box just south of Lake Merritt, popping a random bit deep in the latter’s architecture across the gap from “one” to “zero.”
With the result that three years’ worth of email piles up in my Inbox this morning, in a long implacable surge, every single last message of it marked as unread. Now, admittedly, on the long list of stressors we’ll come to know in this life, this has to rank as a minor entry, even a trivial one. But here’s the crux: it turns out that a surprising and disheartening number of these mails were sent by people no longer among the living.
There is, of course, something uncanny about this. And also something uniquely hamfisted, some unintentional but deep autism that rides at the signature frequency of our information technology and delivers a slap in the face just when you’re least prepared to accept or tolerate same.
I’m not necessarily sure I can even see a solution here. Oh, OK, sure, I can imagine a technical fix, deep in the nightmare of limitlessly-interconnected social ubiquity that I’m sure some people actually want to build: one where the distributed intelligence of the net infers one’s death from the variety of cues racking up in the available relational semantics, and quashes all traffic originating from one’s (Open)ID on its way through the pipes. Yeah, that’d do the trick. But that in any event is a dodge, and not an answer.
So I suppose we’ll just have to get used to this kind of thing cropping up from time to time: mail from the dear departed, set in present tense and voice, to be dealt with just like anything else that shows up in the Inbox - this bizarrely acute and explicit reminder of loss just one more feature of the labor-saving, planet-linking technology we so depend on.
As we used to say in the Army, though, that’s ate the fuck up.
In the end, it is the public’s responsibility to do the hard work of parsing the difference between superficial creations designed to cover up a hidden, cynical agenda, and sincere efforts to create a more enlightened vision of a civilization that is evolving at a brutal pace.
Maybe so, Nic: maybe so. But if that’s the case, then surely it’s the critic’s responsibility to present things to architecture’s various publics in a way they can get their respective heads around? To explain the issues in play, many of which will be far from self-explanatory to people who don’t spend their days immersed in the domain? To demonstrate how a particular proposal responds or does not respond to one or another conception of the public good, or advances one agenda over another?
Not to mince words: it’s your job. You’ve been invested with a certain amount of power to frame these issues, lent to you by an institution with considerable reach and influence. I can hardly think of a pulpit bullier. Now use it.
I’m just back from a visit with Michael Young’s superbright R&D team over at the New York Times, and it was a total treat.
Michael and Nick Bilton demo’d Shifd for me, the application which took top honors at the London Hack Day that Mr. Coates organized (/”organised”). Shifd is one of those ideas so transcendently clever you immediately see how it would fit into your life: it basically allows you to transfer content from your desktop machine to your mobile device and back again, delivering it via the most appropriate channel. It’s actually easier to use than it is to explain, and I have to tell you, I could have used it today. Among all the other cool things they’re working on, this is one project I definitely hope they get the budget to scale up properly.
It was a thoroughgoing pleasure meeting Michael and Nick and their teammates Alexis Lloyd and Amy Hyde, but you just know I was geeking out about the building, too - about its birch-tree-and-moss atrium, about the hushed and almost reverential four-storey newsroom, about its much-hyped adaptive environmental-management systems, and especially about Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s brilliant installation Moveable Type.
Hansen and Rubin’s piece is really quite, quite good. It uses a loop of cleverly-posed algorithms to pull snippets of content from the enormous Times database, then displays them one-by-one on a corridor of old-fashioned monitor screens. Sometimes the rule specifies content including numbers, so you get a wash of factoids and statistics, most of them vaguely but perhaps unsurprisingly bleak; at others, the piece will cull its texts from sentences starting with “I” or “You,” or even letters to the editor.
Now, there are a lot of pieces like this one, generically. You’ll find something along similar lines just about anywhere a news, search or intelligence organization has a high-profile, public-facing lobby. But Moveable Type succeeds where every installation of its ilk I’ve encountered fails: it got me thinking about just what “news” is, about what kinds of symbols we use to quantify, represent and understand the world we’re immersed in, about how truly rare is the “difference that makes a difference.” Your first reaction to Moveable Type is glee, but it gets pretty heady if you pause to think about it for even a moment or two - and it’s worth pointing out that a lot of this power seems to derive from note-perfect interaction design, especially in the registers of sound design and typography.
Y’all New Yorkers and sundry visitors should go see it now, though, because something tells me that the whole area may be cordoned off before too long: Renzo Piano’s vaunted building, it turns out, sheds ice like a five-star mofo. We sat in the comfortable cafeteria, watching chunks of ice half the size of plateglass windows sail down to their shardy doom on the street below, and all that kept running through my head was the single word liability.
Apparently, the entire block surrounding had to be shut this morning. You just can’t do that in that part of town whenever it snows - for chrissakes, that’s Port Authority! I predict lawsuits, recriminations, heartbreaking spin-off effects (like real-estate developers and their pet architects retreating still further into conservatism), but most of all, stopgap buffer zones being thrown up around the shaft anytime the temperature drops below 35.
At any rate: thanks to Michael for the invitation, double thanks to Younghee for the introduction, congratulations to the Shifd team on your Hack Day victory and to Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen on your lovely intervention…and Renzo, give me a call if you need a good lawyer.
We all know how much I love to bellyache about bad customer service here on Speedbird. The less-often-acknowledged flipside, though, is the still-greater pleasure I take in giving maximum props whenever and wherever such props are due. This next account, in its simplicity and cheer, struck me as one of my best CS experiences of a year thickly strewn with same, and I want to publicly call it out as such in the hope that it’s able to serve as object lesson in some wise.
Long, long ago (mid-2001, to be precise) I bought a full Eidetic Neo font package from Emigre, simply on the strength of its considerable beauty, and from my desire to support its designer.
I’m not much of a graphic designer, though, and when I have cause to set something in type I all but invariably resort to Helvetica or Akzidenz, with maybe the very occasional excursion as far afield as Transport or DIN. So Eidetic sat in my font folder, appreciated but unused from that moment to this, across four laptops and five OS upgrades.
Well, comes a day that I have the perfect application for it. And guess what? I find now that I am utterly unable to actually set text in Eidetic Neo. All of a sudden, for whatever reason - perhaps the resource files got corrupted somehow, perhaps some eldritch underlying requirement of OS X shifted between versions - the font lacked that fundamental requirement called “spacing.” WhatevertextIsetinEideticgotmungedtogetherjustlikethis; I could futz around with kerning to approximate spaces, but it looked just as awful as you’d expect. It was basically a total no-go.
So hoping against hope, rather, and considering in some corner of my mind whether I should just bite the bullet and repurchase the package entire, I wrote to Emigre on Wodinsday, at 13.50 EST.
By six o’clock my time, I had in hand a direct response from a named human being, Tim Starback. Tim not merely offered me immediate access to replacement downloads, but stayed with me through some hiccups I experienced when one of those proved to be unusable. By ten minutes after I opened up my machine this morning, the problem was completely resolved.
I have my Eidetic, and something else besides: the knowledge that Emigre stands behind its products, however long ago they were purchased and however trivially small the transaction involved. What’s more, Tim offered this support rapidly, unconditionally, patiently and cheerfully. Hearty thanks to him, and my congratulations to Emigre. With service this exceptional - and sadly, it is quite literally exceptional - I only wish I had more opportunity to support you.
As a way of kicking off our discussion at the Architectural League tomorrow Friday evening, each of the speakers has been asked to contribute a brief “provocation,” “understood to be an opinion rooted in evidence, and not simply a statement of fact.” The panel is just a little over 48 hours away now, but I’m still not entirely sure what sort of provocation I might usefully offer. Here’s what I’m thinking so far:
In their highly recommended Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists, the artist/technologists Casey Reas and Ben Fry quote legendary developer Alan Kay’s definition of full literacy: “The ability to ‘read’ a medium means you can access materials and tools created by others. The ability to ‘write’ in a medium means you can generate materials and tools for others. You must have both to be literate.”
We understand Kay to be speaking about something other than storage media; in context, his clear implication is that one can only be a fully-empowered citizen of a digital age if one understands just how the tools which shape our environments and experiences were made. Kay’s central metaphor for agency here is the dual act of inscription and decipherment, and as it happens, this is one we embrace and extend in the “read/write urbanism” we discuss in our pamphlet on Urban Computing and its Discontents.
This emphasis on literacy has evidently been seductive for students of urbanity. Kevin Lynch, of course, speaks of a city’s “legibility,” and, in a different mode, we’ve been accustomed to “reading” cities as “texts” at least since Barthes‘ work of the late 1950s. Nor has this trope been left behind with the other intellectual impedimenta of late twentieth century thought: Bill Mitchell’s recent collection on digital-urbanist themes is called Placing Words.
I myself am an almost shockingly linear, textual, literal person in the way I think, occasionally ploddingly so. So from where I stand, this is an appealing, accessible, perhaps an obvious way to speak about engaging and understanding complexity. But trouble arises when we begin to use this framework to talk about robust urban computing: the systems that structure and determine outcomes in this context - distributed armatures of minuscule embedded sensors, processors, and actuators - cannot be “read” in any ordinary sense. Individually, they’re the proverbial “black boxes,” and what’s worse, they achieve their effects by being connected in nonlinear, emergent process loops. The result can be something more closely akin to “spooky action at a distance” than to any process scaled to bodily space, time and expectation.
Therefore. My “opinion rooted in evidence” is that, ironically, the “read/write city” we say we want to help into being is at real danger of absconding from everyday comprehensibility. That as a result, we need to do some serious thinking as to what measures we might take to ensure its legibility to all those who will be living in and using it. That legibility does not happen by itself, least of all when most of the decisions that matter - that signify - have already been made, by parties unknown and at levels inaccessible. That the single most important role we can play now, as designers of urban-informatic structures, is to underwrite, support and extend the legibility of the things we make.
That’s pretty good, actually. See you Friday night.
