Talkin’ Everyware, tomorrow night in San Francisco

I’m pleased to pass along the news that tomorrow evening, Wednesday the 18th of August, 2010, the UX Book Club SF will be discussing my Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing. It’ll be interesting to hear what people think of the book after some four and a half years in the wild, at a time when it feels quaintly obsolescent to me, yet is objectively more relevant than it was on the day of its publication.

The meetup is at 1501 Mariposa Street, between 19.00 and 21.00. I’m going to be there, of course, but will do my damndest to maintain a dignified silence, somewhere in the back of the room. You can RSVP on the Facebook page or, I’m sure, just show up. Drinks afterward.

San Francisco days, San Francisco nights

After travails & sorrows best left unexplicated, Nurri and I have finally arrived in San Francisco…just in time for its “summer.”

I’ll be here for the next month or so, doing some writing, working on some projects, but mostly just enjoying the city and the luxury of having real time to spend with all our good friends here. Drop a line if you’re up for e.g. Zeitgeisting.

The overarching vision

One of the responses I often get after a talk is that, while I may have offered a critical take on existing and emergent trends in ubiquitous interactivity, I’ve failed to frame an affirmative vision of what I believe such interactivity ought to look like.

To be honest, I’m not sure this is entirely a fair cop. Sometimes the duty of an observer is simply to point out that a given situation is unfortunate, unaesthetic or undesirable, that one or another emperor is prancing around the block all buck-nekkid. This is an especially important thing to do when consensus might otherwise seal around the essential OKness of something that is really, truly Not OK.

But there’s another sense in which the complaint is not without a certain justice. There’s nothing less fair to the working designer than some dilettante, someone without any skin in the game, second-guessing their decisions — especially when the sideline sniper hasn’t had to squander their hope and energy along the nigh-endless gantlet of compromises, arguments, negotiations and endless meetings that constitutes the contemporary corporate development experience. Somewhere inside, I do feel that if I’m going to make a decent chunk of my living taking the efforts of others to pieces, it’s only right and proper that I throw something of my own on the table, to expose my own notions to the rigorous vetting I demand of any other. Some part of me feels like I should be sketching some kind of overarching, affirmative vision.

It was only liminally intentional, at best, but it’s now clear to me that over the last few months, I’ve been setting forth the building blocks of just such a thing here on Speedbird. For a variety of reasons, I’m not so hot on grand Statements of Intent at this point in my life, so it’s nowhere near as coherent as a purpose-built manifesto like this…but if you string the following (mostly rather wordy) posts together, the outlines of my stance ought to become pretty clear.

In 2010, anyway, this is my own personal vision of informatic technology at the service of the full range of human desire and complexity. Not a word of it is intended as a “solution” to what are inevitably and correctly local social or political challenges…but it is intended to give people everywhere better tools with which to join such struggles. I hope you find it useful, and invite you to subject its claims and assumptions to the same skepticism I’ve applied to other visions of ubiquitous technology.

Context

Understanding, first, the complexity of the environment in which any intervention will take place, and what kind of disciplinary tools might be useful in framing sensitive interventions.

- Toward urban system design

Frameworks for citizen responsiveness

Using ubiquitous informatics to reinforce a sense of public life and one’s own agency. Inviting new urban actors to the stage.

- Part I
- Part II: Toward a read/write urbanism

Transmobility

Using the envisioned frameworks instrumentally, to help people manage what is all-but-invariably among the most vexing challenges faced by citydwellers: getting around.

- Part I
- Part II
- Free mobility, social mobility…transmobility: Part III

Every user a developer

Arguing that the true gains will be made not by offering people powerful tools, but the ability to make their own tools of equal power.

- Part I: A brief history, with hopeful branches
- Part II: Momcomp

Respectful interfaces

Arguing that, while entirely new technical possibilities ultimately demand interface metaphors that convey the full measure of their power, they should also be designed in recognition of the environment in which they’ll be deployed.

- What Apple needs to do now
- jnd: An emergent vocabulary of form for urban screens

Every user a developer, part II, or: Momcomp

I wanted to take up a challenge Mike Migurski inadvertently laid down in comments the other day, in his response to my piece on the ongoing democratization of development for interactive systems.

I get where he’s coming from, especially his point about the moving-goalpost definition of “ease of use.” But I’m not convinced that there isn’t a whole lot further we could take tools like App Inventor toward making them painless for ordinary people to use, and I think — if you’ll forgive me, Mike — he’s mistaking my point about alternatives to the app paradigm. (It’s a little inside-baseball, but in brief: I acknowledge that the contemporary thrust of development is about things that happen in the browser, and that many “apps” are essentially specialized browsers. I just happen to believe that, despite the relative accessibility of tools like Apple’s iOS SDK, this whole model is still unnecessarily intimidating, and based on paradigms most users simply won’t get.)

So I thought I’d try a little thought experiment, to see if I couldn’t do a better job of getting my point across. I thought I’d start with a real, non-technically-inclined person, my mom, and a real challenge she used to confront on a several-times-a-month basis. And then I tried to imagine a toolkit which would allow her — as she is, and with little or no additional training — to build a custom module of functionality that would help her address this challenge, that she could use on an ad-hoc or near-realtime basis, and that would effectively lower the net frustration she experienced.

I have to say, right up front, that what I came up with is heavily, heavily dependent on circumstances which might never come to be. It posits a world in which there are widely-shared specifications for the description of networked objects we might encounter, whether those objects are people, places, things, or other kinds of system resources. And, of course, the open, shared, widely-adopted interoperability frameworks and standards that would allow us to bind these resources together and animate their interaction in useful ways. This, to put it mildly, is not the world we live in today. But it’s a world I’d like to see come to life, and if the best way to predict the future is to invent it, well: here’s my shot.

This is the use case. My mom lives in the Princeton, NJ area, a reasonably typical sweep of American suburbia that’s almost entirely predicated on automobility. Somewhere between two and five times a month, though, on a not-always-predictable basis, she has to drive to the nearest New Jersey Transit station, Princeton Junction, and there catch the train into New York City. Between the routine congestion of the area, the vagaries of the NJT timetable, and the hassle of finding parking at the station, she’s generally hugely stressed out by having to predict from among the available options the routing that will get her to the station in time, let her find a place to park, buy a ticket, and catch a given train. Our meetings in New York are generally subject to a back-and-forth flurry of last-minute phone calls: which train is she aiming for? What’s the traffic situation on Route 206? How about Route 1? Which train did she actually make? It’s not much fun, on either end, and yet something like this is how a great many people go about suturing their lives together, even in an age when information about most of the particulars here (time, location, traffic, timetable) exists, and is readily accessible from the device she has in her pocket.

Now my mom is not, in the slightest, a stupid woman. She just doesn’t like “technology.” And although she’s comfortable with (even delighted by) the iPhone UI, like a great many people she’s not the kind of person who’s going to switch back and forth between a Google Maps app and a New Jersey Transit app and whatever else she needs to come up with a relevant answer. So not only do I want to give her a single tool that offers her just the information she needs, and nothing else, but I want to give her the power to build that tool herself, so it speaks to her in something approaching her own voice.

What you see in this PDF, therefore, is a schematic representation of a constellation of plug-and-play objects she’d be choosing from and fusing together to make her ad-hoc service. Each of these objects is represented by a graphic icon and each is characterized under the surface by an arbitrary number of attributes and (inherent, dynamic and relational) attribute values. By selecting high-level, self-describing objects relevant to what she wants to do, and then using an enhanced text editor to compose what is effectively a rebus providing operators for these arguments, someone like my mom — with no technical background, or interest in or inclination toward acquiring one — can make herself a highly useful module of functionality, suited to her immediate and particular needs. She could even bundle it into a wrapper and upload it back to the network, either for someone else in nearly-identical circumstances to use as-is, or for others to deconstruct and rebuild according to their own requirements, given objects more relevant to their own local conditions.

Is it “an app”? No, not really. It’s something more, and less. It’s “just” a natural-language, textual interface layer to some reasonably complicated multivariate calculations running in the background. And in this telling of things, anyway, she built this layer herself, from available modular components fused together in an exceedingly lightweight, “intuitive” development environment. (You, Mike and the baby Jesus will have to forgive me: I’ve represented these components as something resembling Legos.)

Now I’m always a little concerned, when pushing something like this out, that I’m making myself look like that grizzled guy we’ve all encountered, wedged into a booth at All-Nite Donuts, guzzling serial cups of black coffee and scrawling his incoherent Grand Unified Theory of Everything across a stack of sweat-wrinkled legal pads. Nobody is more aware than me that there are holes in this schema you could drive a Northeast Corridor commuter train through. But I think it does a better job than I’ve yet been able to manage on two counts:

- It makes a better case than I was able to previously, regarding how easy the composition of complex functionality can and ought to be;

- And it lays out in black and white just what geomorphic feats of heavy lifting need to be taken care of in the background before any such vision could come to pass.

The things which I’ve painted as trivial here are admittedly anything but. But they are, I sincerely believe, how we’re going to handle — have to handle — the human interface to this so-called Internet of Things we keep talking about. Each of the networked resources in the world, whether location or service or object or human being, is going to have to be characterized in a consistent, natural, interoperable way, and we’re going to have to offer folks equally high-level environments for process composition using these resources. We’re going to have to devise architectures and frameworks that let ordinary people everywhere interact with all the networked power that is everywhere around them, and do so in a way that doesn’t add to their existing burden of hassle and care.

Momcomp, in other words. It’s an idea whose time I believe has come.

***
I hope you enjoy the PDF I ginned up to illustrate my above contentions. You’re free to take and use and rework it in any way you want and for what purpose you will, just so long as the use is noncommercial and you identify me as the source author. You can find the full terms of the Creative Commons license under which it’s provided to you here.

I’m shutting down threaded comments, by the way; regrettably, this otherwise-lovely theme doesn’t handle them particularly well. This has the particularly irritating consequence of rendering existing threaded discussions all but incoherent, for which I apologize. I’ve written to the theme author to see if there may be a solution. In the meantime, please try to make do. Thanks.

Disconnecting, people…

I imagine this will have been obvious for quite some time now to most anyone who cares, but as of the end of this month I’ll no longer be working at Nokia.

Despite the brave, concerted efforts of a great many highly talented people, my two years at Nokia House have been very, very difficult — so difficult, indeed, that it’s become hard for me to reconstruct now the bases of the optimism with which I began the adventure.

I haven’t quite decided whether I’m going to write up a comprehensive post-mortem, or just let things be and move on. As the alert might have inferred from yesterday’s piece on App Inventor, I’ve been thinking a good deal lately about Doug Bowman’s farewell to Google, and whether or not anything constructive came in the aftermath of that. It’s hard for me to tell, amidst the sound and fury the piece generated in the relevant circles, whether Google or, indeed, Doug himself learned anything useful from the controversy, and that’s going to be my threshold in deciding whether or not I have anything public to say about my experience.

I do think there are useful things I might say about Nokia, and how it might address the situation in which it now finds itself, but I’m far from convinced that anything I say would make any difference at all. Above all, what I fear is that anything I write would be counterproductive for my friends who remain inside, fighting the good fight. And, to be honest, the perception that my motivations in writing would be self-serving or self-exculpatory.

For now, let me just say that far and away the best part of working at Nokia has been the opportunity to meet and work alongside literally dozens of brilliant, beautiful, funny, super-capable people — so very many that I daren’t start listing names in an attempt to be comprehensive, lest I overlook someone awesome. It’s weak sauce to say so, but you know who you are…and I only hope you know how much I appreciate and admire you all.

Nurri and I have our hands full over the next few months, wrangling an intercontinental move, getting some travel in, and cooking up new Do projects goodness for you. There are also some other things I’m working on that I suspect you’ll be very, very interested to hear about. More about all of that in due season.

The thought I want to leave you with is that for all the disappointment I feel when I consider the missed opportunities of these last two years, I actually have no regrets. I’ve learned some very valuable lessons about my own personal strengths and weaknesses, how and how not to organize efforts so they have a chance of success. And hey: we got to live in Helsinki for two glorious summers, made a ton of amazing friends, and enjoyed some experiences we never would have had we stayed in New York. And there’s not a damn thing wrong with any of that. Now: we throttle up and prepare for Go.

A Bastille Day gift for you: “Transmobility” in French

…thanks to Groupe Chronos and Caroline de Francqueville: La transmobilité! (I believe the other two parts are in preparation as we speak.)

And while we’re on the topic of les choses français: happy Bastille Day! I offer you my usual commemoration.

Cities and citizenship; fake security and the real thing

I saw a great Stephen Graham talk yesterday at the 24th AESOP Annual Conference at Aalto University in Espoo, called “Cities, Space, Security: The New Military Urbanism.”

I’ve enjoyed Graham’s thinking for quite awhile now, since picking his Splintering Urbanism off the shelf of late, lamented Micawber Books way, way back in the day. His argument here, in part, is that conceptualizations of urban space developed by the American, British and Israeli militaries, particularly, to support operations from Mogadishu to Gaza have begun to condition the metropolitan-in-both-senses fabric. This is a process he refers to as “Foucault’s boomerang,” and which will be familiar to any student of the intelligence community as “blowback.”

Graham calls out a litany of unhappy developments driven by this neo-Haussmannian thought, including a progressive cordoning by way of which the right of free movement in cities is slowly replaced by a checkpoint mentality, the contours of public space are subtly conditioned by simulations of blast physics, and events like the Olympics or the G20 are used to field-test techniques and strategies of urban control that eventually make their way into everyday policing.

To me, what’s really problematic about all of this is that it inscribes in our putatively urban places the fear of, and hostility to, the ordinary life of cities that completely suffuses the MOUT literature. It’s fine to assert that an infantry squad on patrol has to regard everyday urban space as festooned with “the clutter of concealment,” in which any number of threats might be secreted. But for that overwhelming majority of users of the city who do not happen to be conducting house-to-house sweep-and-clear operations…that’s just Tottenham Court Road. Or East 14th Street, or Mannerheimintie. And those are just newsstands, and parked cars, and bus shelters. That our cities should be designed for the former case over the latter strikes me as the kind of obscene argument that only someone who never loved city life in the first place could even think to propose.

This is why I had to nod in recognition when Graham described the security-industrial complex’s desperate attempt to develop video analytics that would permit algorithmic characterizations of urban “normality,” so as to simultaneously be able to recognize anomalies (“threats”). When you have any familiarity at all with the social and physical terrain of suburban northern Virginia, and the other locales in which these systems predominantly tend to be developed, you can see the punchline coming from miles away: anyone for whom Tysons Corner represents an uncomfortable concentration of human heterogeneity wouldn’t be terribly likely to recognize big-city normality if it bit them in the ass. How much less so, then, the algorithms authored by such a person?

Graham’s whole line of inquiry here is most pointedly relevant to me personally when he takes up the question of networked sensing and actuation, and situates it in the MOUT discourse as a tool to help the warfighter or security agent make sense of the chaotic urban environment. Needless to say, this is a vision that I believe must be strongly and continuously contested by those of us who understand the same sensing, reporting and actuation apparatus instead as a mechanism for citizen engagement and empowerment.

At any rate, if Graham’s still-newish book Cities Under Siege offers anything like as crisp and comprehensive an overview of the domain as this talk did, it will be well-worth picking up. (If you’re not too wrung-out and depressed by considering all of this, I also recommend Eyal Weizman’s essential Hollow Land as a companion. It’s a book-length expansion on the themes first explored in the brilliant “Walking Through Walls.”)

While we’re on the topic of citizen engagement: I’m delighted to be able to pass on to you the word that I’ve joined Code for America‘s Board of Advisors.

I think CfA is doing multiple important things at once: helping city governments and managers understand what emergent interactive technologies can do for them and their constituents; strongly countering the cheap cynicism about who government is, and what it is for, that seems to be so characteristic of our American moment; and maybe at the same time tempering the technical community’s natural enthusiasm for technical solutions with some immersion in the always charged and tangled arena of municipal politics.

This last aspect of the mission is particularly important to me. I’ve seen one or two responses to my recent work suggesting that people understand me to be arguing for the very thing I’m always so horrendified by, which is precisely the idea that social and political fissures can be patched with technology. As it happens, I don’t believe this, or anything like it, as readers with a more holistic familiarity with my output understand, but I thought the point could use some underlining. The more technologists gain a sense of the limits of their tools, and what these tools might actually be good for, the more effectively they can bring their special expertise to bear on the challenges that confront us.

What I see here, in the parallax between the picture Stephen Graham drew for us and CfA’s vision of America, is two entirely different conceptions of the complicated relationship between urban space, networked technology and “security.” Is this notion some grim, shoddy farce of heavy-handed control, sold to us by defense contractors who nurture a deep-seated distrust of city life and lives — a half-trillion-dollar sham that will eviscerate the potential of our public spaces, and even on its own terms never, ever work just right? Or is mutual security something that can only be coaxed to emerge from the difficult interplay of communities, needs and capabilities, much less totalizing in its promises but infinitely better able to deliver on them?

You know I believe it’s (long past) time to reinvigorate a sense of public life in the United States, an awareness of collective challenges, mutual obligations and shared outcomes, and for me, here, the medium is also the message. I’m looking forward to helping Code for America in whatever way I can — in no small part because I do believe that there are threats and bad actors in the world, and that collective security is best underwritten by vibrant, functioning, resilient cities. Vibrant cities…and people who love them.

A fresh look

…for changing circumstances. This is WordPress.com’s lovely Wu Wei theme, by Jeff Ngan, which in name and appearance captures nicely a little something of the way I feel these days: light, unencumbered, effortless. I hope you like it.

Helsinki heads-up

Hey hey! We’re back in HEL for a few hours, at the tail end of a bad jag of travel: two conferences and two additional speaking appearances on two continents in two weeks. (And you wondered why I hadn’t been writing here.) Thanks to everyone at AT&T and Sonae; to swift & steady Claudio; to my good friends at Nordkapp and all the participants in last weekend’s Touchscapes workshop; and especially to Anab, Michelle, Juha and Sarah for sharing some quality AMS time with us.

Stand by for some thoughts on the ethics of making do and adaptive reuse; appropriate and mistaken approaches to serving “emerging markets” at the “bottom of the pyramid”; and some advice from a speaker’s perspective on how (and how not) to organize conferences and other events.

On this week’s agenda: a talk and mini-walkshop in Oulu, part of the Second Open Ubiquitous City Seminar, prep for a speaking appearance in Berlin next week and the Barcelona Systems/Layers walkshop week after that (!).

Recap for the week ending 9th May 2010

Yeah, that’s what the calendar says. I kind of refuse to believe it my ownself, seeing as the thermometer registers forty-one degrees miserably Fahrenheit.

Nevertheless, another week of 2010 down. Here’s what happened on Speedbird this week:

- We celebrated the third of MAY twenty-TEN, the day on which the action of John Brunner’s towering 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar begins;
- paused to consider that streets were something that had to be invented, and asked what similarly obvious innovations might remain to be claimed;
- essayed a nowcast of the network weather, by way of clarifying my fundamental stance on technology;
- argued that a free-as-in-beer transmobility would pay for itself many times over, and in some very important ways;
- described beginner’s mind, and how to get it;
- and finally, cast a jaundiced eye on the fall of Empire, and what happens to cities (and people) in its aftermath.

The upcoming is — volcano gods willing — a travel week, so not too much content in the offing. I’ll be at FutureEverything in Manchester between Wednesday and Friday, and in New York and Chicago for the six days after that. Ping if you want to get together for a chat, a drink, an etc., and I’ll see you here as and when able.