Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Some thoughts from the post Here Comes Everybody -

Clay Shirky

TV, Cognitive Surplus, and Wikipedia

A talk by Clay Shirky called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. Following on themes from his book, Here Comes Everybody, he tells a story that goes like this:

" We gained lots of free time (a "cognitive surplus") in the 40s and 50s because of shorter workweeks. We squandered the surplus by watching TV sitcoms and the like. Now we're finally waking up from this "collective bender" and putting our energies into better things, like editing Wikipedia.

I have a number of problems with this story. First of all, did we gain free time in the 40s and 50s? I'm not an expert, but what I've read about work life has said that Americans are working more hours now than they did at the beginning of the 20th century, not less.

Second, is the time now spent editing Wikipedia or doing other things online really coming from time formerly spent watching TV? In other words, even if there's a negative correlation between TV viewing and online activity, correlation doesn't imply causality.

Third, who's to say which of these activities is more valuable? Shirky has a couple of fairly simple rules for assigning value. Producing is better than consuming -- so writing a blog or posting to a mailing list is better than watching TV or reading. Activity is better than inactivity or passivity -- playing World of Warcraft is more valuable than watching a movie.

I think those rules are awfully simplistic and don't seem to get at the heart of what's valuable. Some TV shows and movies are far more sophisticated works of art than are most video games. Reading a book can be a much more efficient way to deepen one's understanding of a topic than debating it online. Even an adolescence wasted watching Gilligan's Island (an example of Shirky's) might reward you later with the creative juice to launch a career writing postmodern novels.

It's wishful thinking to believe that all of these new technologies will bring forth some great creative and intellectual bounty. We've already got hundreds of millions of blogs -- how much have they really changed things? How important is Wikipedia, really? If it disappeared tomorrow would anyone be truly inconvenienced? I doubt it -- Google would turn up another source or you'd go look in the library if it really mattered. Yet think of all the energy and hours that have been put into Wikipedia. The return on investment just doesn't seem that impressive."

Why blog this?
Its interesting perspective of the social move of free time and maybe in a way not to take technology as the great hope but as a tool. For me its the perspective of understanding and acknowledgment of technology as a tool that is important for my own work.

Quote to capture work upgrade & other pieces

"[The] dynamics of computational artefacts extend beyond the interface narrowly defined, to relations of people with each other and to the place of computing in their ongoing activities. System design, it follows, must include not only the design of innovative technologies, but their artful integration with the rest of the social and material world. The value of artefacts on this view lies less in their intrinsic features, than in their contribution to particular social-material landscapes." " -- Lucy Suchman

• Some useful discussion from the IxDA site:

Some thoughts on Interaction Design and the Agile Environment from IxDA may have some useful points and diagrams for continuing work

Interaction Design in an Agile Environment -This may also be useful also for future evaluation of research use

Metaphors- A discussion with some of the books in the area and some current PhD work, may be useful in providing insight in when and when not too use metaphors and the cognitive process behind it.

Measuring User Experience - With a discussion on best practice to Measure User Experience,based on 4 key pillars: 1) Branding; 2) Usability ; 3) Content and 4) functionality. Can ignore branding, remaining 3 may prove useful for evaluation later on.

• Stumbled across a very good blog, entitled “The Restless Mind through putting people first feed useful posts from blog.

The design of everyday relationships

MIT Professor Donald Schön [observed] that design is a “conversation with materials.” In many ways users have become “materials” as much as participants. We not only engage them explicitly through interaction design to create discrete features, but also in aggregate as social systems and platforms amplify their implicit actions to create value.

The siren call of the system
Well-designed systems are not, in fact, designed. They are the product of evolution. […] Systems, like narratives, take time to reveal themselves to their authors. Changes in technology, consumer preferences, and markets take years to play out. It’s not clear from day one where the system will go or how it will adapt. […] Systems are so rarely produced because they take time and time is one resource companies don’t have. Most die long before the system is revealed.

Apple and the enigma of innovation
What makes Apple special isn’t design. Or process. Or talent. It’s fear. Fear of the man who is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. (And sheathed in titanium. An engineer slaving away on the iPhone SDK isn’t concerned about the industry, his peers, or his boss. His relentless pursuit of “system elegance” is simply an animal’s instinct to avoid pain, manifested largely during the senior management review.


And insight into a designers mind....?

View from Microsoft on the future of human computer interaction

A agenda set out from Microsoft research in line with some thoughts of my own
Blogged on/from Putting people first link

Report from Microsoft Research and the future of human computer interaction

"Moving into the 21st century, there are murmurings in the research and design communities signalling the need for a change: a change that puts more emphasis on placing users –people—front and centre in that agenda; a change that is less about pervasive, “smart” computing and more about technology that enables and recognizes human values.

This new agenda raises all kinds of key questions: What is the role of technology in the 21st century, or what would we like it to be? How as researchers, designers and practitioners should we orient to this role? What are the key questions for Human-Computer Interaction as we move forward? What are the new paradigms and research agendas that emerge as a result? What are the human values we are designing for, and what does this mean for the evaluation of technology?"

Why blog this?
How can I can address and understand these type of questions and the nature of them in context of my own work, lots more to think about....

Fantastic quote from front of report

"The question persists and indeed grows whether the computer will make it easier or harder for human beings to know who they really are, to identify their real problems, to respond more fully to beauty, to place adequate value on life, and to make their world safer than it now is."

Norman Cousins – The Poet and the Computer, 1966

Also On the website of Microsoft Research Cambridge you can read a really good interview with Richard Harper, the conference organiser.

Harper on developing technology: “For many years, technology has been developed, and then society shapes it and polishes it. Now, society’s hopes and goals and people need to be involved in the process of developing technology from the outset, because it makes a big difference to what the technologies end up becoming. There’s no longer a line between technology and invention and development and society, no longer a line between what the technology might do and what the user can do. What human endeavor might be and what social endeavor might be must be considered from the very bottom of the firmware in devices and in the infrastructures that link different devices right through to the GUI on the outside.”

Post from Fade to play

Stumbled across a post from the blog fade to play caught my eye as ties in some nice ideas with Sellen & Harpers book the myth of the paperless office from a research study conducted in 2006

"This 2006 research paper entitled “Our Lives in Digital Times” by G. Sciadas from Statistics Canada has just been released. It discusses how the notion that we have become a paperless society is a myth as the use of office technologies such as email have actually increased paper usage.

Statistics Canada found that:

Not only is the notion of a paperless society defeated by existing data, but a visit to any modern office workplace will confirm that printers everywhere continue to spit out massive amounts of paper, and paper recycling bins are full,

There are also social behavioural trends in ICT and communication that are discussed:

The pattern of communication and interaction has changed. The reality is that people are talking to other people – whether to the person next door or to someone thousands of miles and time zones away. Thus, it is not that people are becoming anti-social; it is that people are becoming differently social.

In summary, key outcomes of ICTs are manifested in shifting behavioural patterns everywhere, with real consequences. Moreover, the pattern of communications has changed, something exemplified by the rise in long distance and the explosion in international calling made possible by
liberalized markets and falling prices. Such expanded circles of communication have found an even better expression through e-mail that knows no boundaries. People make the choice to expand their associations and move from geographically defined communities to communities of interest. As well, they are willing to pay for their choices. ICT spending is on the rise and, within this higher spending, substitutions take place in favour of newer ICTs, such as the Internet, and against older ones, such as the telephone. The willingness of people to pay can also be seen by the fact that many low income households choose to spend a relatively higher proportion of their income on ICTs.

A summary of the report can be found in this CBC news report.

This report confirms finding from Richard Harper and Abigail Sellen who wrote The Myth of the Paperless Office (2001) and found that paper usage increased on average 40% because of email in an organisation).

Relevance: Although offices are using paper more, I wonder about whether students are printing more in universities. I would say that they are printing less. I spend a significant time with my laptop around undergrads that I see reading papers in pdf form online on their laptop rather than printing them out. This may be due to convenience and a desire for cost savings. Perhaps, older people just feel more comfortable with paper."

Also the blog has recommended the book

Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web (Voices That Matter) (Paperback) - but only on American amazon!

Why blog this?

A blog to keep an eye on as holds some really interesting points, and research paper mentioned above may hold some significance for future reference .

DEFINE: Affordance

DEFINE: Affordance

URL: DEFINE: Affordance

In the discipline of IxD, the word has been used to define a possible

action perceived by a user within some environment (Norman 1988). In the

classic example, the affordance of a door with a flat metal plate is

"push." The affordance resolves to a verb, an action to be performed.

However, of late, I've seen the word used loosely to describe the clues

that suggest an object's possible actions. Applied in a colloquial sense

to the classic example above, the "affordance" is the flat metal plate.

Another example of this usage would be gloss applied to the visual

design of a UI button. The gloss itself is the affordance, as opposed to

the action "click".




I'm curious as to the community's opinion on this matter. How do you use

the word in your day to day discussions? Is it appropriate to use the

term both ways?

Appreciate your opinions?


Why blog this?
Evidence of the misinterpretation of the word within the field useful to throw out some ideas and gather how it is being used in the field or not...

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Collection of thoughts

A couple of posts captured from RSS feed and a comment from Wendy Mackay e-lab paper

Delver Reinvents Search

URL: Delver Reinvents Search

The most impressive thing about the new search engine Delver is that it knows who you are and who your friends are even if you don't import your address book or add your social networking profiles. Instead, Delver leverages the social graph to map out a user's social connections. Since everyone's social graph is unique, like a fingerprint, the same query will yield vastly different results for each user. The results are more personal and meaningful to users than a generic search using "normal" search engine.

But don't call Delver a "social search engine."

"That name belongs to services like Mahalo," says Liad Agmon, Delver CEO. "We prefer the term 'socially connected search engine'." That term makes sense because Delver is not a social network built around a search engine, but a search engine who indexes and queries your social network to deliver its results. Instead of just looking at a web site's popularity, Delver looks at information like whether your friends have tagged the site or if it's found on their social network profiles, bookmarking sites, photos and video sharing sites, or on their blogs. The results are more relevant because they account for who a person is and what they find valuable.

Agmon adds, "People want trusted information from their friends, but may not know who in their network is knowledgeable about a given topic. We make Web search more fun and meaningful by prioritizing results based on a user's network, while enabling the user to discover others in their extended network who share common interests."

Even without registering for an account, Delver will try to determine who you are by searching any public social network profiles you may have on sites like Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube. If you do decide to register on the site, though, you can then choose to associate your accounts with Delver in order to obtain even more accurate results. Delver currently indexes the entire web, and specifically indexes people's social connections on flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, hi5, facebook, Blogger, and, they are adding more all the time. When they go into public beta (circa May, 2008), an optional email import process will be provided as well.

Maximizing Your "Whole" Social Network

Many of us have friends, family members, or colleagues on sites like MySpace and facebook who aren't into using all the latest and greatest web apps and technologies. These friends may have a MySpace profile or a blog, but without visiting these sites directly, there was no way to gather information from these people before. Now with Delver, their profiles and contributions to your social graph are indexed.

No one has to sign up for Delver for you to have them included in your search results.

This is a real breakthrough since prior to Delver, the maximum value you would get out of social networks was directly related to how many of your friends would join. I don't know about you, but I still have plenty of friends who are on MySpace and nothing else, and are quite content with that. With each new social network I joined, the number of my non-tech friends that would follow me dwindled down to nearly nothing. Now it doesn't matter. They can stay on MySpace forever and yet the content they create there will be valuable to me.

Privacy Concerns?

It's important to understand that Delver doesn't display anything that isn't already publicly available. "If Google can get to it, so can Delver," says Agmon. But Delver just makes it so much easier to do so. You can access people's social information with such ease that anyone who hasn't been good about setting their profiles to "private" (or who doesn't know to do so), may be surprised to find themselves searchable on Delver.

Using Delver

After claiming your identity in Delver, your social graph is mapped and displayed for you beneath the Delver search box. Dotted lines connect you to your friends and your "friends of friends.

- Why blog this?
Insight to how social search could be thought of, and how in fact may provide the desired insight for scientific work ?

Collaborative Technologies and Science: More Tools or More Risk?

URL: Collaborative Technologies and Science: More Tools or More Risk?

Social networking has begun to make inroads in the scientific community. The Scientific American recent article, Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk, discusses wikis, blogs, and other technologies and how their usage by researchers could be transforming how science is researched, published, disseminated, and viewed. Research work is beginning to become available through blogs, wikis, and social networks by a small but growing group of researchers.

In Eric Schell's post, Evidence of the Value of Blogs as Scholarship, he mentions a case where a postdoc geneticist received credit and acknowledgement for his blog entries. Reed Cartwright posted his random thoughts on a mutant plant gene on his blog in March 2005. One year later after reading the post Luca Comai, a plant geneticist, contacted Reed. He and said that he had coincidentally arrived at the same hypothesis, and was about to publish his research in Plant Cell. Comai said he felt obligated to acknowledge Mr. Cartwright’s blog post and offered to make him a co-author of his article. Mr. Cartwright, who is not a plant geneticist, accepted the offer.

Of course this method of information and knowledge sharing is not without controversy. While there are researchers praising the transparent and "open notebook" approach citing various success stories like OpenWetWare, UsefulChem, Chembarkothers, there are others worried about potential minefields. The fear of being scooped and the lack of attribution and credit can be huge barriers to overcome in a system where being the first to report a discovery, publishing peer reviewed journals and having heavily cited articles is the foundation for promotion within scientific community.

I like what Bora Zivkovic said in the Scientific American article, "It's a Darwinian process. About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread." I think that not only sums up the evolution of these tools in science but other disciplines as well such as medicine, education, and libraries.

Why blog this?
Raises some of the issues of the potential of Web 2.0 and the areas of sharing and collaboration where may need consideration, think enforces the link with Bruno Latours model of creditability and how scientists search for this in their work. Question in how to overcome this for collaboration?

Extract from The Missing Link: Augmenting Biology Laboratory Notebooks Wendy E.Mackay

"This project is one of a series that examine settings in
which attempts to replace paper artifacts have failed
[16,17,18,19,20 ].We observe and work with users as we
try to understand their interaction with both paper artifacts
and on-line systems.Then,through a series of
brainstorming and prototyping participatory design
sessions,we create prototypes that integrate paper and on-
line documents,attempting to integrate the different media
and benefit from the advantages of both.Each setting poses
unique design challenges,but when examined together,
they begin to offer a more complete understanding of how
to effectively manage the link between physical and on-line
documents and questions the assumption that documents of
the future will exist solely in electronic form."

16.Mackay,W.(1998)Augmented Reality:Linking real
and virtual worlds.In Proceedings of AVI'98 ,L'Aquila,
Italy:ACM.p.1-8.
17.Mackay,W.(1999)Is Paper Safer?The Role of Paper
Flight Strips in Air Traffic Control.ACM/Transactions
on Computer-Human Interaction,6(4),p.311-340.
18.Mackay,W.and Pagani,D.(1994).Video Mosaic:
Laying out time in a physical space.In Proc.of
Multimedia '94 .San Francisco:ACM,p.165-172.
19.Mackay,W.,Fayard,A.,Frobert,L.&Médini,L.,
(1998)Reinventing the Familiar:Exploring an Aug-
mented Reality Design Space for Air Traffic Control.
In Proc.of CHI '98 ,L.A.:ACM,p.558-565.
20.Mackay,W.,Pagani D.,Faber L.,Inwood B.,
Launiainen P.,Brenta L.&Pouzol V.(1995).Ariel:
Augmenting Paper Engineering Drawings.In CHI '95
Video Program ,San Francisco CA:ACM.

Why blog this?
Think the extract captures the way in which existing e-lab book work has gone and focused upon the action of emulation of paper, where must acknowledge the evolutionary process of paper as a technology and so open a direction to open up for new technology to strive too.

Collection of really useful other blog thoughts

Great post on Recursive affordances - post from Past&Vineger

These two ash-tray found in Geneva and Lausanne are two impressive examples of an object affordances:

Why do I blog this? This is utterly curious from a design perspective. the artifacts designed to received trashed objects looks like the object itself. A sort of recursive affordance to some extent. What does that mean? It’s actually not that recursive and the second example if maybe more self-explanatory since the two different garbages are next to each other. Besides, the first one has a little hole that only allow to receive small things like cigarettes.

Style of posting taken from this blog
- The "Why I blog this?" point is a great way to capture the reasoning behind the post and so I will look to adopt this approach as think it could provide more clarity for reasoning behind each posting of thoughts.


Why do I blog this? - recursive affordances

I have some thoughts to draw up a table of the range of affordances of the lab book as I have provided/put forward an argument that the affodances of paper and so lab book is the foundations of what makes it a ideal mobile ubiquitous artifact, with the ability to fit int work practice.

Some thoughts now maybe with gather the existing range of affordances from Gaver, Sellen & Harper etc to collectively put forward which of these are why the lab book works and where the shortcomings have been in existing technology.

Steve Portigal on scanning/meme-broking

URL: Steve Portigal on scanning/meme-broking

There is a great interview of Steve Portigal in influx. Some excerpts I found relevant:

“A great design strategist (…) someone who has had a few different professional identities and gets excited by the spaces where disciplines, schools of thought, and methods overlap. They are curious and easily intrigued: they like to observe what’s going on around them and they’re good at listening to people. And they know how to use all this data to synthesize new patterns and communicate them clearly to a range of audiences. Charlie Stross, in the sci-fi book “Accelerando”, describes the profession of a “meme broker” and the intense amount of content they have to assimilate every day in order to do this. Bruce Sterling calls this activity “scanning“ looking at all the sources one can and constantly asking what does this mean for my clients. Being able to work through all those data sources and pull out the implications is crucial for design strategy.
(…)
The best research brings to life the imperfect and messy stories of real people and presents generative frameworks that lead the way forward for new designs, products, services, features, communications, or whatever is needed.“

Why blog this ?
Some good insights here that rings a bell with personal thoughts, especially concerning the messiness of reality and the need to uncover quirks, peculiars situations, extreme users as well as exceptions.

Love the idea too of what design strategist should represent and what I think the different perspectives that are required to allow for insight - nice to point to think on for my own work as would like to look for a final position to allow for recommendations to be made in a design strategy context - drawing on use from work and in particularly table of affordances from lab books.

I agree massively with too:

"The best research brings to life the imperfect and messy stories of real people and presents generative frameworks that lead the way forward for new designs, products, services, features, communications, or whatever is needed."

Feel the methods selected for my own research will be part of the comment by Bruce Sterling:

"Bruce Sterling calls this activity “scanning“ looking at all the sources one can and constantly asking what does this mean for my clients. Being able to work through all those data sources and pull out the implications is crucial for design strategy."

- Feel this relates to the conversation that was had with Richard Coyne from Edinburgh and his talk on design tunning - do have his slides to verify/support this.

Web 3.0: Is It About Personalization?

"On the UK's Guardian newspaper site today, writer Jemina Kiss suggested that Web 3.0 will be about recommendation. "If web 2.0 could be summarized as interaction, web 3.0 must be about recommendation and personalization," she wrote. Using Last.fm and Facebook's Beacon as an example, Kiss painted a picture of a web where personalized recommendation services can feed us information on new music, new products, and where to eat. It's a marketers dream and it's really not far off from the definitions we've come up with in the past here on ReadWriteWeb. We've written about web 3.0 and attempted to define it many, many times here over the past year. One of the common themes between almost all of the posts is that Web 3.0 and the vision of the Semantic Web are joined at the hip. Last April, we held a contest asking readers for their web 3.0 definitions. Our favorite came from Robert O'Brien, who defined Web 3.0 as a "decentralized asynchronous me." "Web 1.0: Centralized Them. Web 2.0: Distributed Us. Web 3.0: Decentralized Me," he wrote. "[Web 3.0 is] about me when I don't want to participate in the world. It's about me when I want to have more control of my environment particularly who I let in. When my attention is stretched who/what do I pay attention to and who do I let pay attention to me. It is more effective communication for me!""

Why blog this?
My own work is directed to both web2.0 and incorporating its concept so I am particularly interested where the next step is with the web 3.0 direction - in order to give further power of a tool for scientists, especially when a concern for scientists is about privacy of their own environment and the background to what 3.0 is building towards is "control of my environment particularly who I let in."

Finally -Quote of the day, Feb 3rd, 2008: Interaction-Design.org Quote-of-the-Day

"On the one hand, design must be firmly rooted in the work practices of both users and designers; on the other it must confront these practices with their existing shortcomings and introduce new artifacts such as mock-ups, prototypes, or metaphors, and potentially cause breakdowns. This is how we may lean to transcend our own tradition as users and as designers. -- Boedker, Greenbaum and Kyng, p. 147-148 in "Setting the stage for design as action""


Why do I blog this?
My interpretation of this quote is to take the best of both worlds work practice of users and designers & then how must have ability to confront practices with shortcomings I think this is where continued research questions lie...