“Ad absurdum”

So here’s a small gem that you can be sure is going to make it into the book. This piece showed up in my del.icio.us network the other day, and I was intrigued enough to do just a little digging. It turns out that the blurb is substantially accurate: responding to “rampant” vandalism, including at least one arson, Tiehallinto, the department responsible for maintaining Finland’s highways, has started fitting its more isolated rest-stop toilets with networked locks that disengage remotely when the word “open” is texted to a central service.

Now. It is true that over 90% of Finns own some kind of mobile device - the number stood at 87.6% by the end of 2002, the most recent figures I can find on the Ministry of Transport and Communications site - but still. People without mobiles never need to use the toilet? This is differential permissioning at its most thoughtless.

I have often enough, over the past several years of writing and speaking about such issues, been accused by audience members of resorting to reductio ad absurdum arguments when describing the potential pitfalls of poor ubiquitous design, of erecting straw men of one sort or another. From experience, I can tell you that this is exactly the charge that would be laid had I offered an audience the notional example of a remote rest-stop toilet that only unlocked in response to an SMS. I can tell you right now what at least one person in the crowd would be moved to say: “Nobody would be so heedless, so irresponsible as to design a system that way.”

No, apparently not.

The particular system in question appears to be problematic on more than one point: Tiehallinto has outsourced its management to a private company, who will maintain a “short term” register of every number used to unlock the system. The premise here is that if vandalism does occur, the bad actors will be able to be identified and held responsible - and not at all that some curious third party might ever notice your number in a log, and be motivated to ask what the hell you were doing all the way out in Paimio past midnight on a Wednesday. Because you know that’s just what’s going to happen with this system, and all the others like it that are sure to be installed over the next few years.

My issue with systems like this isn’t just that they’re badly designed. It’s that anyone trying to point out their manifest weaknesses beforehand is generally brushed off with the explanation that all the corner cases had been anticipated; that one can relax one’s nit-picky vigilance, because nothing will be allowed to go wrogn. It’s almost getting to be amusing to me, the unwonted generosity with which even technically-sophisticated audiences are willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to design organizations, as if history had never offered up the Edsel, the Challenger, the Palm Folio or the Zune.

On the contrary, my experience has been that no matter how, yes, absurd an idea is, even at first inspection, you can find some large design organization willing to sign off on it - gin up the most self-evidently harebrained idea you please, and I promise you that someone’s tried, or trying, to bring it to market. Greenfield’s axiom: it is almost impossible, in the domain of ubiquitous informatics, to devise a product or service so transcendently and obviously stupid that someone won’t think it’s worth devoting development resources to.

Along similar lines - although here I disagree that the idea is necessarily such a bad one - is the wail of that one indignant engineer in the audience for my LIFT talk last year who insisted that “nobody would ever be stupid enough” to install a fully-addressable network stack behind a light switch or a thermostat, because “what would the point be?” How I have often wished that I’d had my iPhone with me on stage that day, because literally ten seconds’ Googling later that evening was sufficient to establish that there is at least one commercial enterprise that offers just exactly that.

What’s going on here? Why are people so trusting of designers, when history is littered with evidence suggesting a contrary or at least a more nuanced take might serve us all just as well? I’m all for that combination of optimism, ambition and raw desire that allows designers to forge into the unknown with unproven, inherently risky propositions, but a little common sense wouldn’t be such a bad idea to deploy alongside them. Especially when the stakes are so high.

Reminder: Newcity, New Museum, Friday

Please do come join us for Nextcity: The Art of the Possible, the evening of discussion and exploration I’m putting together at the New Museum this Friday.

We’re kicking off at nineteen-hundred, and it’ll be history by 21.00 - short sharp and sweet. Drinks after at a location TBD. See you soon!

Placemaking: Strategies including architecture

I thought a good number of you might be interested in this “Streets as Places” workshop the Project for Public Spaces is putting on 27 and 28 March here in NYC. I sorely want to go, but will have to juggle a few things (like teaching class that Thursday) before I can positively say I’ll be there.

The workshop, like PPS itself, is probably a bit New Urbanist for my taste, but I’d argue that’s precisely why those of us who have gotten over New Urbanism should engage and attend things like this. Put crudely, these folks are not the enemy; by and large, they want many of the same things of our cities that I do, and such differences that do exist are largely (but admittedly not exclusively) aesthetic. Or aesthetic and generational.

One of my not-so-secret agendas, of course, is helping to articulate a Newer Urbanism, and I think there’s plenty of room to work with organizations like PPS in framing an affirmative agenda for responsive cities. I’d love to see some of our Urban Computing students there, or some of the folks I’ve met in visits to Kazys Varnelis’s and David and Soo-In’s classes up at Columbia: I think you’d bring a vital note of informatic savvy to the proceedings.

Bush-U-Like

As you’ll no doubt have inferred from the post immediately preceding this one, I’ve been thinking about Vannevar Bush again.

I doubt there’s been a worthwhile work on the history of computing in the history of computing that did not cite his “As We May Think,” the July 1945 Atlantic article in which he introduced the world to the “memex.” Its insights were that far ahead of their time, that foundational to so much that would come afterward.

Just what did Bush say in “As We May Think”? It’s one of those texts - like Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things, like (yes, again) The Death and Life of Great American Cities - so seminal that you primarily remember its emotional impact, and not always its argument. In the course of writing once again a book in which I’ll wind up citing him, I thought it’d be more than worthwhile to go back to the source and pin down just what it is that I’m sending people to see.

Bush started by describing a problem we now recognize as essentially one of knowledge management: by the mid-twentieth century, there was already too much specialized information in the world for one person to keep fully abreast of developments in their own field, let alone communicate meaningfully across disciplines. (Forget talking to nonspecialists entirely.) As a result, the collective body of knowledge we call “science” lagged badly: we simply did not know what it is that we already knew. This is, still, something most of us can attest to; I felt it acutely the moment I began to cobble together the arguments that are supposed to wind up as a book.

Where Bush differed from most people who have ever complained about this fact of life, though, was in daring to sketch out a proposed solution. His first step was to establish the contemporary existence of certain technologies crucial to the new thing about to be proposed - in a sense, the small pieces he’s about to loosely connect. A few rapid-fire paragraphs suffice to acquaint the reader with the input and output modalities he will rely on: voders and vocoders, short focal-length lenses, photocells and thermionic tubes.

In this, he wasn’t interested in elegance, economy or size, at least not initially; this step was just an existence proof. What was necessary to demonstrate was simply that the sort of information-processing operations he had in mind could (in principle, anyway) be accomplished with extant techniques; optimization could wait.

As long as the methods to do what he wished existed in the world, Bush was certain that they would later be improved. And while he may not yet have had an explicitly-enunciated Moore’s Law to back him up, there’s no doubt that he felt information technology was already embarked on a curve of continual improvement: “[i]t would be a brave man who could predict that such [technologies] will always remain clumsy, slow, and faulty…”

But he does manage to establish his kit of parts, and this buys him a fully articulated information-processing ecology - albeit one that doesn’t quite go as far as it might. (Hey, what do you want for a single article?) If the telegraph was “the Victorian Internet,” what can be glimpsed here is a fedora-sporting, Truman-era Internet of solenoids, punchcards and radio waves.

It would have been something to see. This much is clear from the two use cases he offers us: first a scientific researcher equipped with mobile image-capture and annotation, then a point-of-purchase transaction, taking place in a great department store. The latter scene is particularly poignant, in that he specifies a system that provides for inventory management, sales commissions, accounting and billing…and uses it to print out a regular monthly bill to be sent to the customer through postal mail! (If Bush here seizes up with a thump against the limits of his worldview, it’s beyond dispute that he still managed to limn an entire computational ecology whose real-world equivalents wouldn’t be deployed until the early 1970s.)

As radical as these ideas must have seemed to the audience of 1945, they’re just appetizers. The main course would be both the crowning achievement of Vannevar Bush’s career and the reason why “As We May Think” is still read and remembered: a device he called the memex. This would be “a sort of mechanized private file and library…an enlarged intimate supplement to memory.” (Maybe we’d now call it a PAA, a “personal analogue assistant.”)

The memex, as Bush described it, was an ordinary office desk augmented with an internal, microminiaturized archive (of Library of Congress extent) and tilted display and input screens. It could “presumably” be operated remotely. It allowed not merely the review but also the annotation of whatever body of knowledge had been stored in it. And most critically, via a clever indexing scheme, it allowed one fact to be associated with another. And this was how Bush proposed to deal with the urgent problem of information overload with which he’d begun the article.

The insuperable problem of placing data in storage was that it could only be in one physical place at a time. Librarians, certainly, had over the course of centuries evolved practices aimed at classifying and arranging books such that they could be stored and their locations reliably reacquired with a relative minimum of effort. But such classifications, and the physical nature of knowledge as manifest in books, meant that a history (say) of sexuality in Eastern religions could appear either under “Human Sexuality” or “Religion,” but not under both - not unless you could afford to have multiple copies. There was just the one official and unchanging pathway: at mid-century library science had not yet fully wrestled with the idea of multiplicity, with the idea that one text could present multiple facets of meaning, or acquire multiple meanings that varied by reader and context.

By contrast, decades before hypertext, HTML or the World Wide Web, Bush’s memex proposed to allow its user to organize bodies of knowledge along individualized “trails,” each permanent and immediately available for lookup in exactly the same way that we might use a Web browser’s bookmarks. Moreover, any one item could belong to an arbitrary number of different contextual trails - trails that could be stored side-by-side in one’s own memex, or passed entire to friends and colleagues for them to explore at their leisure, like an analogue del.icio.us.

(One might also argue that, in his provision for a very natural way of organizing knowledge - a schema for storing and recalling information that worked with what was known about human cognition, rather than fighting upstream against it - Bush had unwittingly invented the field of user experience, but we’ll leave that battle for a different day.)

However visionary Bush was in other respects, he was undeniably a man of his time. Except in a vague and speculative coda, he completely failed to anticipate digital technology. All of the innovations he depends on as componentry of the memex - forehead-mounted cameras, microfilm Brittanicas - are almost comically dependent on the tropes and methods of the analogue world. And, though we can hardly blame him for it, he remained mired in the gender politics of his day: Bush’s future world is one in which investigators are always “he” and the drudgework of data entry is given over to “roomfuls of girls.”

Nevertheless, he did manage to leave us the memex, in which both hypertext and a whole approach to the human use of informatics begin. And he also gave us something else: although “As We May Think” is generally cited as the origin of hypertext, it also depicts a mobile investigator roaming the world freely, “uploading” information to a network there to catch it. Finally, all but buried in his conclusion, he offers up the critical insight on which a man named Mark Weiser would build the doctrine of computational ubiquity some forty years downstream: work with information-processing devices is both more effective and more enjoyable if the user “can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.”

It’s for both this and his frank description of the memex as outboard memory augmentation, rather than the relatively prosaic idea of integrating knowledge-processing devices into a common desk, that I think of Vannevar Bush as belonging properly to the history of ubicomp. Now to draw the lines connecting the memex and the ubicomp that grew out of it to place-making and the city.

Quote for a rainy sidewalk day

There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things. - Vannevar Bush, 1945

Diagnosticians

I think of some people as being crackerjack diagnosticians. Everybody knows someone like this - someone who can eyeball a given situation and tell you precisely what is wrong with it, and how, and why.

This is a useful skill to have, surely, and such people are a vital part of any project team. But in my experience, it’s striking how very rarely people whose primary talent has to do with the accurate assessment of pathology are actually any good at fixing it.

To some degree, I include myself in the above category, which is why I can easily imagine that it must be sort of a sad and frustrating place to find yourself - knowing that you’re an ace at spotting other people’s errors, without being at all sure that you can affirmatively produce meaning and beauty in your own work.

The lesson I’ve learned from working with people like this that their manager has to find the proper role for them, has to make sure that their talent is harnessed, their perspicacity is acknowledged, and that they’re offered ample opportunities for professional growth and development. (Who knows? They might find in time that they’re actually able to execute at the same level of refinement they routinely expect of others.)

But they also need to be buffered somehow, because most people (and certainly most institutions) are incapable of delivering to the stratospheric standards your average diagnostician regards as eminently reasonable. They might be correct in their critique, but they’re not going to be useful. And if there’s anything I’ve learned in the unruly course of my career, it’s that insisting on a position simply for the sake of being able to say that you were right all along does not make for excellent work.

Of course, knowing how to accomplish such buffering is where all the art and mystery lies. : . )

Like Jane never happened

As part of the research I’m doing for The City, I recently picked up the catalogue for the Van Alen Institute’s 2005 show “Open: New Designs for Public Space.”

It’s a pretty enough catalogue, dense with what certainly look like thoughtful essays from folks like Deyan Sudjic and Enrique Peñalosa. It came in the mail, I added it to the pile of research materials that’s threatening to eat the living room, and thought no more about it until last night, which is when I pulled it off the pile and started to leaf through it.

I have to admit to being a little shocked at what I find on page 74: a case study devoted to Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. No matter what direction I come at it from, I’m just not able to conceive of this museum as in any way meeting a reasonable definition of “public space.” It’s a heavily branded private collection to which you must purchase admission, located on the 52nd floor of a skyscraper devoted to the greater glory of Mori Building: you tell me where the “public” is in any of that.

What’s truly astonishing to me is the following paragraph:

Since Le Corbusier first wrote about the “vertical city” in 1931, architects have increasingly striven to push the limits, with all facets of life city from business to pleasure located high above ground: a “city within a city.” The Mori Art Museum and viewing terraces…activate the tower long after the offices have closed and provide Tokyo with a major contemporary art institution, a unique destination and spectacular lookout point.

No acknowledgment here that every notion bound up in Corbusian city planning has been but-thoroughly discredited in the, let’s see, eighty-five years that have passed since Vers une architecture. (Actually, “discredited” doesn’t quite convey the state of affairs properly. “Smashed”? “Shattered”?) No acknowledgment that “city in a city” is a profoundly antiurban stance, one that has been demolished theoretically - most obviously in The Death and Life of Great American Cities - as well as literally, time and time again over the last half-century. Half-century! It’s not as though this is breaking news.

Mr. Mori is known to be a Corb fan, however, and since he’s the one writing the checks, I guess the copywriters and PR folks working on his behalf are bound to repeat the great man’s assertions, however thoroughly debunked they’ve been otherwise. It’s not a job I’d want to have, that’s for sure.

The sad part is the shadow of dubiousness these two pages now cast on the entire volume. I’m going to take each essay on its own merits, of course, and otherwise mine the book for whatever inspiration I can find in it, but I must say Mori’s inclusion has left a bad taste in my mouth.

Fortunately, a new broom has swept through the Van Alen since “Open,” and I have no intention of taking the current management to task over two pages of a catalogue three years old. But the point stands as a more general warning, even if it seems founded on the worst sort of nitpicking: I cannot overemphasize the damage an institution’s credibility suffers in my eyes when it blithely reproduces braindead PR flackery like the above.