Good morning! I invite you to shift your attention now, from the world of remarkable mechanisms (cf Adrian Beukkers in the preceding talk), to the world of stories.

[Text slowly scrolls across screen...]

When
everything else
has gone
from my brain
the President's name
the state capitals
neighborhoods where I lived
and then my own name
and what it was on earth I sought
and then at length the faces of my friends
and finally the faces of my family
when all has dissolved
what will be left
I believe
is topology
the dreaming memory of the land as it lay this way and that."
(Annie Dillard: opening to An American Childhood)

[visual: a land mosaic]

[Text on screen]

A series of aerial landscape photographs, by Alex McClean, at www.landslides-aerials.com
Contour plowing
Grading a new residential subdivision in the desert
Large trucks at a trash landfill
Closely-packed houses in New York, each with its own little swimming pool
A clearcut in the mountains
Pond succession in the New England woods


Northern stars

For those of you who were at the DIS 2000 Conference in New York, let us pick up where we left off, which was stargazing. Now, it might seem really romantic to be showing aerial photography of pond succession, and star fields — not synthetic ones, but actual patterns we'd see if it ever stopped raining here in Amsterdam.

What I'd like to help you think about today, and I think Bruce Sterling got us off on just the right note for this, is to somehow stop calling this attitude Romanticism.

If the rain ever did stop (I know this condition because I once lived in Seattle), and you found yourself looking at the stars, you might have done what I do, which is to first imagine yourself looking at symbols on a surface. When we read symbols, constellations in this case, we assume that we're looking at a surface. Indeed there's a lot of mythology that goes with this. But then what happens, at least for me, is that you realize that you're not looking at a surface at all! In fact, those adjacent bits of light are arriving from infinitely different distances. Then suddenly I, for one, get vertigo. I'm feeling a little bit too light and I'm very glad for the warm earth beneath my back. And then I realise that I'm very fortunate, as are all of us, that we are light enough to move around to look at these things, but not so light that we get spun off into it, into infinity. So maybe what we need to do, is to think about how light to be.

One time I was out looking at stars and somebody pulled out a cell-phone. [The Doors audience had just been admonished not to do this!] It changed the spell because, now we realised that closer at hand than the stars, the air was full of signals. Those of us who are inclined to think in terms of this metaphor, and you may know this one, began to realise that the machine in the garden is now digital.

For those of you who are not familiar with it the story of the machine in the garden, let me explain. The idea came in the early expansion of America, from its East, in the early 19th century. Amid bucolic meadow, suddenly a screaming locomotive burst in, dispelling all notions of classical Arcadia. Ever since that time, other technologies have burst in on other Arcadias. This is the machine in the garden. It's not a totally destructive thing, for as Emerson's famous remark goes, of this period, "railroad iron is a magician's rod, to awaken the sleeping energies of land and water."


The Lackawanna Valley – the famous railroad painting by George Inness

This may help you understand a little bit about Americans and their technology. Emerson and his cross-town contemporary Thoreau figure centrally in a very particular American ethos. This ethos couples an idea of the environment to an idea of the technology of the Republic. Technology opens environments. This is the basis of some very strange things that we see today, such as sport utility vehicles. It is also the basis of an idea that the natural world is somewhere else, that you might visit on weekends. These strange notions demonstrate how European Americans are, still just camping on that lovely continent over there. It's still just a nice piece of real estate to them. They have not gone native; they're just camping.

[visual: philosophers’ camp]

This painting is actually to be found in the Public Library in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, which is the very town where Emerson and Thoreau lived.

[visual: a Yankee village]

More Americana: This is not Concord, Massachusetts which has been engulfed by Boston, but rather Harvard, Massachusetts, (not to be confused with the University) where I had the good fortune to live for a couple of years. And if you are American and you're thinking Norman Rockwell here, well don’t – think Jerry Garcia instead. Please understand how centrally this visual metaphor figures in American ideals about being somewhere. What happens is a dream: a Church camp comes together for a short time, and it carries on a discourse.

[visual: a church camp]

From those dreams comes something that Bruce Sterling called, "abstract, rational, and theological." From there it's easy to get too light, and to drift off the continent that you're just camping on anyway, which you've really messed up and say, OK look, we blew it on the physical environment, let's just be virtual.

[visual: "liquid architecture" — a virtual space]

And if you were around under the goggles circa 1993 you might have enjoyed this sort of thing. My personal favorite goggles experience was the work of Marcos Novak, some of which is shown still here. But it's very tough to reverse engineer the inner-ear part of that: without the physical orienting part of it, we do feel discomfort.

[visual: diagram on nature and technology]

All of this long lead into this talk points to a fundamental dualism that I'd like you to think about, and build your own stories about. It has to do with the relationship of Nature and Artifice. Note that we're all pretty well programmed, and it gets worse the closer you get to California, to assume that Nature is everything that's not Technology and that Technology is everything that's not Nature. I'll leave it at that for the moment.

The lead author of GORP, which is the Great Outdoor Recreation Pages, which is a backpackers’ website, has an editorial on there about how awful it is that people bring cell-phones into the wilderness. Whereas somehow to bring along hi-tech tents and stoves is ok. (If you want to think about lightness all day, try a backpacking trip in the Sierra). And now you can bring along a GPS.

[visual: a small GPS receiver]

In one important event of the last year, and certainly something that has transpired since the last Doors, Clinton repealed the scrambling of the global positioning system (GPS). I'm sure some of you are making a living off this already. This is an example of ubiquitous computing. Information technology goes everywhere.

This idea of technology being everywhere, challenges the notion of Nature being the place where there's no technology. According to that definition, if you have genuinely ubiquitous computing, then there is no Nature left. That doesn't make any sense. There's lots of Nature. In fact computers might be part of it. Thus it's our job, as we rethink the relationship of Nature and artifice, to look carefully at context, which is part of our theme at the conference.

I understand that John mentioned these thoughts of mine at the start of the CHI conference. Appropriateness has actually surpassed performance as the key measure of good design and in fact appropriateness is largely determined by context and in fact many of the contexts that are richest and that we value most are places.

So how do places inform what we do? How can we make technologies that help us understand places? Can we use technology to understand rather than overcome the constraints of the physical world that we live in? Can the Americans stop conquering North America for instance? I think they won.

[visual: Hewlett-Packard advertising campaign: "Unnatural", with a bird nesting in computer cables]

I'm sure I'm not the only person thinking about this. This is from an advertising campaign by Hewlett Packard. I don't quite know what to make of it. Except is seems like part of a shift from mechanism metaphors of the 20th century to the biological metaphors of this century. I have to agree with the likes of zoologist Edward O. Wilson that a lot of environmental predispositions do exist.

For example, Wilson says that in humanity the fear of snakes is not born in. What's born in – deeply hard-coded if you will – structured into the brain – is the ability to learn the fear of snakes. And in fact compared to other fears which go away as the child learns about the world around, the fear of snakes increases as people get older. And out of that biology, that physical condition, grows the mythology of the serpent. That's more story than I'm ready for right now.

[visual: a Paris slum]

Among other such fears, we have fear of space itself. There's a wonderful story about how the city of Paris cleared away what they called the Ilots Insalbres – zones of unhealthfullness – in the mid 20th century. Americans, too, clears slums out of fear. There exists some kind of environmental predisposition about spatiality which is quite complex and culturally situated.

Now in a talk like this, I get only three claims. I think that's what the rules say. There's number one. Take notes, there's a quiz.

Embodied predispositions exist

[visual: Stewart Brand/ Brian Eno diagram about nature as a substrate. Nature(revolving slowly at the base)/ language / culture / government / commerce / fashion (revolving quickly at the surface)]

Now we saw this slide the other day, but I'm happy to show it to everybody I talk to. I really think this explains a couple of things. Nature's not going away. Embodied predispositions might exist at the level of language even. Governments may be relevant. Design that's merely fashion might be shallow!

It's a wonderful way of understanding that Nature is not somewhere else that you visit when you get a chance, but is underneath everything. It turns more slowly, but does turn. And there's a lot of good work going on about this, in the world of language.

[visual: the quote, "Cognitive science makes an ever-stronger case for thought as a mostly unconscious biological process, metaphorical in conception, rich in spatial relations." – George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, "Philosophy in the Flesh"]

You might know of Lakoff & Johnson from their well-known work Metaphors We Live By. Well, their more recent book is looking exactly at this business of spatial-environmental predispositions. If you're inclined at all toward cognitive psychology, which indeed many people involved in interaction design need to be, then check it out.

In the realm of stories, you're just going to have to read text off the screen, I can't do the powerpoint thing and read those to you, you're just going to have to read them yourself, and it's not nearly as lovely as those ray wings (c.f. Adrian Beukkers’ structures). I'm sorry about that.

[visual: the quote, "By placing things in the periphery, we are able to attune to many more things than we could if everything had to be at the center. Things in the periphery are attuned to by the large portion of our brains devoted to peripheral (sensory) processing. Thus the periphery is informing without overburdening."
–John Seeley Brown (former) director, (hopefully not former) Xerox
PARC]

This idea of the space around is pretty much standard theory in circles I know and when I spent months at PARC five years ago it wasn't, so that's changed, recently and I think PARC had a lot to do with that. I think we are at the point where we can acknowledge that the computer-industry party line has moved from Virtual Reality to Ubiquitous Computing. Therefore we actually have to be suspicious of ubiquitous computing, as we must be suspicious of any official party line technofuture.

[visual: the quote, "Architecture is experienced habitually, in a state of distraction." – Walter Benjamin]

I never get tired of this one. Any reports on the death of architecture are greatly exaggerated. So that gets me to the second claim:

2) We experience the world habitually in a state of distraction, and gradually it confers identity on us.

That might be an easy one. So let’s make it a little harder. This third claim is really what I want to argue in my work these days.

3) We need a typology of situated interactions.

[visual: the quote, "There needs to be an analogy by which the formal structure of a crucial set of social relations is found in the physical world, or in eternity, or anywhere, so long as it is not seen as a socially contrived arrangement. When the analogy is applied back and forth from one set of social relations to another and from these back to nature, its recurring formal structure becomes easily recognized and endowed with self validating truth." – Mary Douglas, "How Institutions Think"]

If you want to see how serious ethnographers, who are of quite a lot more interest to this crowd lately I would hope, are thinking about these issues, well, the British anthropologist Mary Douglas has the best arguments I've found about why patterns at all. And it has to do with analogies to natural conditions. Analogy is key, types or foundational analogies, says Mary Douglas. And in keeping with Global Business Network thread around this conference, this book was on Stewart Brand's booklist for a long time.

[visual: the quote, "Ultimately, we can say that type is the very idea of architecture, that which is closest to its essence." – Aldo Rossi, "The Architecture of the City"]

I think you know this guy. He's doing the "grandfather clause" thing now. (i.e. he is dead, c.f. Bruce Sterling’s talk about the only true greens being dead people)

[visual: plan of New Town, Edinburgh]

As an example of type within the venerable discipline of architecture, look at James Craig's plan for the new town of Edinburgh. Typologically, this is as rich as they get. From a cognitive psychologist's point of view, one might say that this is highly "chunked." From Aldo Rossi’s point of view, one might say that it's full of large, aggregate, palatial forms that get reused. Stuff clusters on to them: it's an aggregation.

[visual: famous Krier sketch on how the res publica and the res economica combine to form the legible city]

You may be familiar with the architect Leon Krier’s many wonderful sketches of what's wrong with modern architecture. You probably don’t agree with the Royalist flavor of it. And if not, I would suggest, what you need to do is add other layers to the city. Digital layers. That could be fun. As we go adding other layers to the city, we're calling that ubiquitous computing. As far as I can tell, if you needed to have ten categories about it, these ones might work well:

Ten categories in ubiquitous computing
1. sites and devices are embedded with microprocessors
2. sensors pick up what is going on
3. communications links form ad-hoc networks of devices
4. tags identify actors
5. actuators close the loop
6. controls make it interactive
7. display spreads out
8. spatial information becomes available, useful, and necessary
9. agents act
10. tuning overcomes rigidity

Any one of these would make a good lecture. Let's talk about how display spreads out. Think of the NASDAQ sign in Times Square; note that IDEO has a prototype for roll up screens; – it goes on and on. 'There's text all over people's clothing', observed Mark Weiser.

But how do these technical possibilities shape up as socially rich contexts? For an emphasis on appropriateness (rather than performance) it may help to turn the tables toward typology.

Here is one way in to all this work. It comes from a workshop done last Spring, at Carnegie Mellon University, which is certainly a very good bastion of the technocratic aristocracy. I've learned more at Carnegie Mellon, than in any other two years of my adult life. We were trying to find ways to talk about contextual issues, that you can't measure with Fitt’s Law, and which aren't a GOMS methodology at all.

So this is just a stake in the ground. There were some larger things going on. For example, Trilogy Software from Austin had sponsored quite a detailed inquiry into the role of situated interaction design in the peculiar American custom of changing your house every few years.But there were some more light-hearted things. Someone did a study of agoraphobics, and made a mindfulness device, there are a lot of recurrent principles.

[visuals: examples of student work]

– Sharing what's on your plate with what's on someone else's plate.
– Tracking your people, this was actually a very practical thing you could do for business.
– Extending the principles of contextual inquiry, which are now fairly standard practice in the design strategist, consultancies of the world. We went out into the field, and, inevitably in design schools, to the problem of waiting for buses.
– Taking some of the principles of polling, or ICQ, and constraining them according to something geo-coded.
– Using tagging, which is another whole talk in itself, as a way of loading up the physical realm with cues.
– Smart trash cans, for Pittsburgh's not-so-bright litterers.

All of this buffered with the scenario method and all of it with concern for assimilation.

[visual: lean and green / finding your tribe / recreational statistics /urban markup language]

These are some of the themes that came up again and again in discussion.
– "Lean and Green" is Bill Mitchell's term if you've seen his book, 'Etopia.' It might be a good theme for this Conference.
– "Finding your Tribe" is Social Navigation.
– "Recreational statistics" is what a lot of information design turns out to be for.
– "Urban Markup Language" is an expression that came up this summer with some nice designers in New York. (Alas UML is taken, of course).

[visual: densely layered text screen of thirty contextual types, on each of which a rollover brings up descriptive text]

So here's what a typology begins to look like. Let me say that it's a characteristic of typologies that they're not infinite. They have a finite, or reasonable number of elements. This is 30. And I couldn't take it to 300 and make it meaningful, nor to three.

That's where it is right now. Each of these becomes a design niche. Somebody gets good at each one of these. So if we're here to talk about technology and design, we're now adding in the environment. We must. Environment constitutes "clear and present danger", says Bruce Sterling.

I say these things: Technology is ubiquitous computing, for a while.The environment is not scenery that you go to, it's a way of knowing. Design is a process of adding value.

I bring up value so we don't get into design’s cultural ghetto that John mentioned. Where these begin to meet, there are interesting domains. Someone at this conference said that there's a '.geo' (dot geo), domain being proposed. I'm talking about typology as a way of bringing environmental knowing into design. Alas typology has been an anathema to the academic design community who live by the principle of mandatory innovation.

So this is what we all do, right? No argument here I hope. But wait a minute. Value as increase of what? And this is really where we do need Paul Hawken here at this conference, because I think he explains best how we are under a tyranny of a very reductive economism, and how the naturalistic things that we're talking about throughout this conference are not Romanticism, they are just better capitalism. Hawken talks about non-fiscal forms of capital, and how not only their maintenance, but their increase is the realm for adding value. I submit to you, that if ours were really a new economy, in a genuinely new economy, then what constitutes value evolves.


Land mosaic

You'll have to recall your Economics 101. Value shifts back and forth between use and exchange. Value is not just cost. It is said that anyone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing is a cynic. There are many kinds of value and this is an eternal problem in philosophy, to make these things commensurable. What I hope is that, through design, we can pluralize the understandings of value. Intrinsic value, for example, is a favorite of the Greens. And in doing so we can help evolve what constitutes value and we can actually add more value.

So it used to be said around Pittsburgh, where I live: "Are you an environmentalist, or do you work for a living?" But now, hopefully within our lifetimes, the environment becomes the economy. This is Hawken’s argument. Design is more important then.

So what's all this got to do with Lightness? Remember: we don't want to float off into the stars, and we don't want to crush the Earth underfoot. Metaphorically, then, what we need to do is build a pair of shoes. This is an old trope, that you're here on Earth to build yourself a pair of shoes, not literally, but metaphorically, and you have to decide you to make them and what kinds of things they will keep you from cutting yourself open on and how they will let you get further, and whether you're better off with very light shoes.

[visual: some leather slippers]

Here's a chance to test that it isn't Romanticism on these very New-Agey moccasins. You can substitute your army boots, or your Doc Martens, if you're more comfortable. But the point is the shoe is a metaphor for altering our sensibilities through artifice, in order to engage Nature more effectively. And how all this differs, or relates, from what I've done in my past work on the craft of technology usage is this: we cannot endure as consumers, or as passive spectators; we actually have to engage the world. The value of being someplace is an extension of the value of making things that I talked about in my previous book.

[visual: the illuminations of the Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893]


So let's spend our last minute looking at something that you can go over to the Van Gough museum and see: the Light exhibit there, which is by happy coincidence is with us. My favorite thing there, worth the price of admission all by itself, is a little panorama from Thomas Edison himself, of the Illuminations of one of the World's Fairs. You are looking at a similar image here, which at from the Colombian Exposition at Chicago, where the Illuminations were the centerpiece. Electricity itself was a spectacle. People would line up early to get into the Grand Court of Honour to see the marvel of control, safety, colour change, and so on that electricity brought to illuminations.

The industrial Historian David Nye, who lives in Denmark, calls this an example of the "technological sublime." I like it because it's not an otherworld so much as it's a double. Much as this electrical double of light re-enlivens the physical realm, so the electronic double of the place-centric information technology re-enlivens the city. Note that good architecture is designed to modulate light falling from above across a façade, however. When you illuminate a façade from below, it makes the familiar turn strange.

It seems to me that it's our job to build the digital double to the physical world, according to our Nature, which moves slowly beneath us, by which all that is now just altogether too familiar does turn strange. By this we can recover the sense of wonder that you can get from looking at the stars.The best way to do all this, is by telling stories about where we are.

[Visual: the quote, "The place-based stories the people tell, and the naming they've done, is their archaeology, architecture, and title to the land. Talk about living lightly." -Gary Snyder]

Thanks.