At least 300 people showed up tonight to see David Byrne give a Powerpoint presentation about Powerpoint. [Free video of the talk may be available soon.]
What luck it was to happen upon one of the best seats in the front row. As Byrne was introduced he sat on the stage, about 5 feet away. The only camera I had was the crappy one on my mobile phone but I couldn't resist a few shots.
Along with David Bowie and a few others, Byrne got me through my childhood during the 1980s. As a kid I loved his otherworldly tunes and that deeper, darker, subtler vibe that set him apart from the shrill, candy-colored MTV culture that overtook pop music in those days.
I can't agree with all his Powerpoint points, but it's fascinating to consider how he views this tool. The user interface geek in me is dying to watch him work with it firsthand in his natural habitat.
I wanted to step up and hug him when he said that a Powerpoint presentation is just part of a larger "performance" which includes not just the person speaking but the audience, the room, the surroundings. Software designers, even self-professed user interface and needs analysis experts, can learn a lot from Byrne. The point seems like an obvious one, but we're still stuck in "user-centered" tunnel vision: we design for a prototypical single person staring at a single computer, as if that person and computer operate in a vacuum. This approach can be worse than meaningless if you ignore the surrounding context. This tunnel vision can be downright dangerous as we design software that moves beyond the desktop and into public spaces.
Byrne presented another intriguing argument: that Powerpoint's constraints, particularly its "low resolution," can be a benefit. (He meant "resolution" in the way the Powerpoint-loathing Edward Tufte uses the word: in terms of graphics quality but also in more general terms of how much information standard Powerpoint templates allow you to convey to an audience at a time). Simpler, lower-resolution images force the audience to become involved more in the presentation because they have to actively connect the dots.
This brought to mind a couple of analogies. Think of how books and radio can seem richer than television -- the lack of visuals forces the audience to actively imagine the action, to envision many details that aren't explicitly described.
Scott McCloud pointed out in his book Understanding Comics that many protagonists in popular comics are drawn in a simpler, less detailed style than other characters and their surroundings. Think of Tintin or Orphan Annie. McCloud theorizes that readers can more easily sympathize with minimally-drawn heroes because they can more easily project themselves into those characters. The more details you give a character, the less that character shares in common with a given reader. On the other hand, the story can be more compelling if faraway lands that the character visits, and other characters that the character encounters, especially bad guys, are drawn in a detailed manner -- because intricate detail in itself can make those thing seem more foreign, interesting or even frightening.
Does this apply to Powerpoint? I don't think so... I still hate Powerpoint and the agonizingly dull, ubiquitously unimaginative corporate communication style that its use has embodied and encouraged since Microsoft purchased the software and took over its development and marketing. The world needs more elegant and customizable presentation tools, which can be made just as easy to use for non-techies as Powerpoint. Constraints can be a blessing, but the wrong sorts of constraints can be a curse.
Anyway, it's fun to watch Byrne turn the Powerpoint tradition on its head.
"Do I really need a camera attached to my mobile phone? Honestly, isn't this just a gimmick?"
Lately I've fielded those questions many times over from friends and family, and even from other tech people.
Even the phonecam manufacturers don't seem to have a clue what people will really use these things for, judging from the foolish scenarios they portray in TV commercials. But that's typical; new technologies are never born fully-formed. Nobody knows how networked cameras will evolve, and nobody knows just how we'll grow to use them. But special properties of networked cameras have convinced me that these tools won't be abandoned any time soon. Some of these capabilities haven't emerged yet but I think they're all on the way.
Here are five important capabilities that seem unique to networked digital cameras:
1) A photographer can use such a camera to send all her photos to a single, central storage place as she takes them. This eliminates the handling of film, smart cards and other intermediary media. It means that cameras can be smaller and cheaper because they don't need massive amounts of storage space. It dramatically simplifies problems involving backups, sorting, and after-the-fact annotation. No more rooting through PCs, CDs, servers, drawers and albums to find that great family portrait from last Thanksgiving.
No single firm or agency can or should store and control everybody's photos. Nobody's photos should -physically- be stored in just one facility. The media should be backed up and mirrored at multiple sites in case fires, floods or whatnot destroy the data at one site. But as far as the user is concerned, the photos should "live" in one secure spot in cyberspace. You should have just one virtual "place" to search through when seeking your photos, so that you don't have to worry about inadvertently losing important photos, and so that you don't have to constantly copy collected photos from one device or place to another.
2) Networked cameras provide the ability to annotate photos as they're created, or soon afterwards. Such annotation can include written comments from the field to accompany particular photos, but I don't think people will bother with that in most cases. Other forms of annotation might be more widely used and more important, including:
3) Networked cameras allow the capability to publish and share photos online as they're taken.
4) Most users usually have their phonecams on hand, just as so many people nowadays usually have a mobile phone on hand. In many ways this is great news: you'll be able to document all of life's wonderful and serendipitous happenings; you'll hardly ever say, "if only I had a camera at hand..." In Japan, where phonecams are old news, teenagers often snap shots for the purpose of enhancing face-to-face conversation. Most such shots are briefly shared via the devices' small screens and then deleted, never to be sent or stored anywhere. Of course this is bad news too; when everyone carries around networked cameras we'll all lose some of the privacy that we now enjoy.
5) Networked cameras provide the ability to transmit photos to audiences without permission from the authorities. These devices rob government officials of their ability to detect and destroy photographic evidence at border crossings. This capability will be especially beneficial in war zones and in police states.
The dark side of interaction design:
Experimental Interaction Unit.
The good news: A version of my column "How to Fix an Election" appeared this month in the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGCHI Bulletin. (I wrote the original version for the general public; I rewrote this newer version to target readers in the Human Computer Interactions industry).
This was not an academic paper. But still it's my first publication in an HCI periodical. Hooray.
The bad news: I submitted the essay (and posted the original on cheesebikini) nine months ago. That was just after the second Florida election fiasco, which the essay addresses. Now the Florida elections are old news. But the essay's points still hold true.
What if dolphins communicate by sending and receiving images? What if humans can learn to do the same, on the fly, via computer mediation?
I know what you're thinking: this guy's been in California far too long. You're probably right.
But bear with me on this.
As a kid growing up by the sea in Florida I was obsessed with bottlenose dolphins. I read everything I could find about them. When I was 13 I borrowed a fancy underwater microphone from an oceanographer and used it to record dolphin sounds at Ocean World, the local marine theme park. I played back the recordings into another dolphin tank. But I didn't get much of a reaction at all. After gathering around this strange noise-making machine for a few minutes, the dolphins quickly grew bored and ignored the tape recorder. They were far more interested in my cheap watch. And dead fish.
Plenty of more serious research (and writing and movie-making) was devoted to the prospect that dolphins' clicks and whistles might be a language. Scientists showed that dolphins convey instructions to one another, but still nobody has proven whether a high-level dolphin language exists.
This week I read a paper by Berkeley's Professor Marc Davis that dramatically changed my thinking about this by pointing out that a dolphin language might not be based on words. Most linguistic dolphin research I've seen seeks dolphin sounds strung together as words, and I always unconsciously assumed that any high-level language must be based on words.
But Davis points out in his paper that some written human languages don't use words at all but instead directly represent meaning visually. The image to the right is a message written in such a language, by a member of the Yukaghir tribe in Siberia. (See Davis' paper for more details and a translation of the letter.)
Like bats, dolphins use echolocation. They emit waves of sound and use the resulting echoes to pinpoint locations, sizes, shapes, densities, and even internal states and structures of animals and objects, with astounding precision and accuracy. If dolphins use their own sounds so skillfully to probe their environments and to "see" what's around them, can they also use sound to create artificial imagery that's "visible" to other dolphins?
Dolphins exhibit a superhuman ability to convey spatial instructions to one another. Nobody's sure how exactly they work this out, but if you watch a group of dolphins carrying out tasks in which they have to quickly synchronize very complicated sets of movements -- during a theme-park performance, for example, or during hunts in which they round up thousands of fish into dense schools -- you'll be amazed at their powers of spatial coordination.
Can you imagine dolphins sending each other visual cues mapped to real-world environments -- or even sending entire artificial "video" scenes showing planned activities -- on the fly?
This may be a stretch; it's probably fiction and so far it's not backed by much science. But it's a very powerful idea that we can use. Even if dolphins cannot communicate this way, perhaps we will be able to, with the help of computers.
Davis and his Garage Cinema Research group at Berkeley are working on it. They're designing systems that they hope will allow regular people to easily and quickly build video compositions, without putting forth the tremendous amount of time, expense and technical knowledge necessary for today's film production. Thanks to smart systems that can recognize media assets and automate much of the video capture, editing and production process, Davis hopes to allow us all to "write" video as often and as easily as we "read" video today. The promise lies not just in replacing the current wasteful and corporate-dominated system of creating polished high-end feature films, but in providing humanity with a new, more powerful form of everyday communication.
This week's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara, California was great fun. I enjoyed the presentations and the ideas, but it was the behavior of the attendees that really fascinated me.
The conference wasn't all "there."
Much of it took place elsewhere, and everywhere -- in cyberspace. My attention was always torn between the physical conference and the virtual conference.
I've never seen so many networked gadgets in use simultaneously in one place. During any given session, much of the audience had their laptops open and online thanks to power outlets and wireless Internet service throughout the conference rooms, lounges and hallways. I was immersed in bandwidth; I was surrounded by a chorus of whirring laptops and clicking keys.
For me, this was a totally new sort of event -- but soon, experiences like this will become commonplace.
The typical scene: up front the speaker presents her talk, projecting a slide show or a demo onto the wall-sized screens. A glance around the darkened room reveals dozens of ghostly blue-white faces gazing into laptop screens.
Many of them are engaged in online chat rooms. ConFab, a Web-based chat tool, was built just for the conference. It allows a person to mouse-over a map of the conference rooms, to specify which physical-world room he's sitting in, to engage in text chats with other attendees, and to see how many people are logged into each conference room. He can even pay a virtual visit to another conference room to find out what people are chatting about over there.
(Network problems made staying connected to ConFab very difficult. But people conferred in more traditional Internet Relay Chat rooms too.)
In the chat rooms people crack jokes and trade opinions about what the speaker is saying, and they write brief summaries of what's going on for people who are tuned in to the conference from other parts of the planet.
People read other folks' comments. They examine the speaker's Web site. They tune in to chats going on simultaneously in the other conference sessions, judging whether to step out and join the session going on next door.
And they blog. I watched at least three people pull out digital cameras during presentations, take snapshots and upload the images to their blogs right there.
People collaborate to take notes on the presentations and discussions using wikis. Groups of people use Hydra, a collaborative editing tool that allows multiple users to elegantly write, edit and add to a single document simultaneously.
That pattern was repeated endlessly throughout the conference. Everyone's energies were divided between cyberspace and the physical world. This is a fascinating phenomenon, but when the novelty wears off will such connectedness make for better or worse conferences?
Did the average attendee go home with more or less knowledge, with more or fewer useful acquaintances, with more or less encouragement than they would have acquired without the digital networking? What do you think?
The conference left me more confused about these questions than ever. For one thing, I wasted a lot of my attention and energy dealing with a couple of basic technical problems that the organizers can easily iron out in time for next year's conference. But next year, won't my attention be devoted to a new set of problems to wrestle or configurations to fine-tune as more real-world subtleties slip by unnoticed?
I want to experiment more with this, and I know I won't have to wait long.
(A freakish footnote: I'm writing this entry on my laptop in a Berkeley WiFi cafe, days after the conference ended. Three other geeks bend over three other laptops by the window. They're talking about their experiences at the same conference, as they post entries to their own blogs about it. Should I laugh or cry?)
(Photos in this entry by Derrick Story of the O'Reilly Network.)
Strange things are afoot in the world of Human-Computer Interactions. This month at CHI 2003, the biggest annual HCI-related conference on the planet, bathroom talk was all the buzz.
At eye-level above the urinal a video game appears, complete with jumping hamsters and a simulated urine stream that's mapped to the location and movement of the user's real urine stream. Hit a hamster and it turns yellow, screams and spins out of control as your score increases by ten points. The MIT students even built a penis simulator that allows women to spray water into the urinal. A urinal like this might persuade the neighborhood pub's patrons to refuel by purchasing more beer.
"Concern for man himself and his fate must form the chief interest for all technical endeavors. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations."
People have predicted very complex "augmented-reality" systems that might arise in the near future, when many folks will carry around location-aware devices. But how about a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system?
Here's how it might work: your device includes a green thumbs-up button and a red thumbs-down button, TiVo-remote style. As you move through the city, when you enter a favorite restaurant or club or cafe you click the "thumbs up" button. When you pass that restaurant where you got food poisoning or that stuffy overpriced bar, you click "thumbs down." And if you enter an especially wonderful place, you click "thumbs up" twice to give it two thumbs up.
The key: you don't have to interrupt your daily activities; just reach into your pocket and click one of two buttons whenever you think of it.
Each time you press the button, the device records your geographical location and the thumb rating. Soon you have a little database, a map that shows the spots around town that you love and the spots that you hate.
So what? So nothing, until people share their preference maps. Now you have a powerful concept.
Thanks to this network, you can share your preference map with anyone who wants to use it, and you can freely use other peoples' preference maps. You decide which of your friends have tastes closest to your own, and you subscribe to those friends' preference maps.
Software on your device notifies you when you're near a spot that friends have rated positively; if a dozen of your friends rated a place highly, the device specifies via sounds or spoken words that the spot got a lot of thumbs up from the people you trust. And another thing -- software maps this for you, visually overlaying the green and red thumb-clicks over a map of a city or a region or a building.
You can also form preference groups, just as you form e-mail discussion lists. Everyone who shares an interest adds their account to a particular list, and that list compiles all members' preference maps into a master map for that group. Then anyone in the group can subscribe to the group map and use it or turn it off as desired. (Of course, if you no longer trust a person or a group's tastes, you can filter out their thumb-clicks on your map by removing that person or group from your list).
For certain events you use time-sensitive preference maps with thumb-clicks that fade over time. This could be great at an art fair or an outdoor festival -- you form a preference group with a bunch of friends who will attend the same event, and as you all explore the place, you each tag the coolest things and the most worthless things that you see. You might glance at a map and notice a dozen bright green blips at bandstand 3, which suggests that something amazing is going down there right now. Those green blips by the coat-check, on the other hand, have faded, so you probably missed whatever happened there. So you head straight to the action at bandstand 3.
(I'm reading the book "The Orchid Thief," and I just finished a scene that takes place at an orchid convention. Word spreads through the convention center that "you've got to check out the orchid that smells just like grape Kool-Aid." Frustrated flower freaks are milling around, blindly trying to find that particular orchid among hundreds of flowers on display. The orchid freaks would immediately know just where to find the most talked-about flowers in the show if they used such a preference system. That's what sparked this idea.)
"We are increasingly entrusting to software the various gathering, sorting and linking operations that we used to perform for ourselves and that were part of the process of thinking about a subject... The shift from book to screen may in its eventual impact on what knowlege is be as transformative as the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics."
"Just as calculators can diminish our mathematical capacities, computers can rob us of the ability to synthesize the threads of data into the whole cloth of knowledge."
Restak's comparison seems invalid. Calculators substitute for (and improve upon) our basic math skills; they're better at long division than we are. But computers can't substitute for our knowledge-synthesis skills because they can't replicate those skills. Humans still need to synthesize knowledge, so why would that ability waste away in the face of computers?
But Restak also points out research suggesting that "expressing one's opinion on a computer screen engages a different part of the brain than when writing or typing the same sentiment on a piece of paper."
He theorizes that certain critical faculties arising from the left prefrontal lobe might be weaker when we use a word processor than they become when we write with pen and paper. He says a computer's bright backlit screen, and its mosaics of images changing at high speeds, excite the visual and emotional portions of the brain. This, Restak says, can explain the lapses in discretion and excesses of emotion that often emerge in workplace e-mails. I'd love to see these theories tested.
We should reflect on our digital creations' effects on our minds. Many people say that television dumbed down humanity, at least in some ways. What about computers? What can we do to reduce any negative effects that our machines have on human intelligence? What can we do to boost positive effects? Should we bother?
And do we want fries with that?
Spoken-word audio version:
how2fix.mp3 - 4 minutes, 1.2 Mb.
Synthesized speech for your MP3 player.
Text version:
About once a month I join my fellow native Floridians in a massive group cringe as the latest piece of staggeringly shameful Sunshine State news rockets its way around the planet.
The latest election embarrassment hit me harder than most Florida fiascoes because Human Computer Interaction professionals and journalists were to blame, and I'm an HCI geek and an ex-reporter.
We didn't learn a thing when Florida made itself the butt of barroom jokes from Stockholm to Singapore by ruining the 2000 presidential election. We made the same mistakes last week.
Let's reflect on this for a moment, before we botch another election.
The media overlooked the core problem behind the gubernatorial election screwup, just as they did in the stories about the presidential-campaign butterfly-ballot screwup. This oversight will not recur if Human Computer Interaction professionals do their job, if they explain to the media and the public the importance of involving users in technology design.
Here's the core problem: the vote-handling system in question doesn't work; it fails because it was not designed for the people who use it.
Rather than dealing with this, most news stories focus on whether voters and poll workers were trained long enough, whether laws were broken in the handling of votes, how results were analyzed, whether there's a conspiracy afoot to steal the election, and so on. These latter questions are important but they're secondary to the core problem; whether or not you have a conspiracy on your hands, you still have a broken ballot system.
The New York Times editorial page echoed most news outlets Sunday in its analysis: "...it appears that most of the problems were caused by improperly trained workers and by voter confusion."
This is like saying the World Trade Center fell because the weather got really hot for a few hours in those middle floors.
Dade County may have dropped the ball in training poll workers. But when people are expected to undergo 12 hours of training before they can operate a simple ballot machine, something is horribly wrong.
Reporters, like the rest of us, expect new technologies to be complicated and difficult to use. After decades of wrestling with the blinking "12:00" on the VCR, who can blame them for forgetting the whole point in designing computerized ballot systems: to make them easier to use and less error-prone than their predecessors?
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Why were the ballot devices so confusing? Because the designers failed to bring the voters and poll workers into the design process.
Most people don't understand that the years of intense training and hard work that turn a person into a talented, capable engineer simultaneously convert that person into a special sort of creature. Such creatures can build fantastic devices that give us wonderful powers, but in mastering these technical intricacies they lose the ability to see the world through the eyes of a regular person.
So if these creatures develop a tool completely on their own, if they presume to understand the regular people who will use the tool, those regular people will invariably end up with a tool that confuses the hell out of them.
At best, regular folks will let that annoying "12:00" keep blinking because setting that clock is such a hassle. At worst they'll press the wrong button and crash an airplane or bungle an election.
Human Computer Interaction workers understand all this because they've watched this typical cycle of failure unfold countless times to produce countless unusable products. HCI workers study a tool's intended users, and they involve those users with engineers during the design process to ensure that the tools will work for their intended audience. They tailor tools to users, so that nobody has to take a 12 hour class before using a simple voting booth.
Most reporters have never heard of a Human Computer Interaction professional, so who will a reporter call regarding the design and implementation of new voting technologies? At best, she'll call the engineers who built the ballot machines and who, in the case of a fiasco like this, are out of touch with their audience and honestly view the problem as a lack of training, a lack of tailoring the users to the tool.
So the media never understand this: tools that work are tailored to their users. From the ground up.
So the public, and the civil servants who purchase voting machines, never recognize the real problem.
So more votes go uncounted.
Journalists need to learn what Human Computer Interaction professionals do; they need to consider the HCI perspective when covering stories about failing systems and confusing tools, so the public and the government can solve these problems. Before this can happen, Human Computer Interaction people need to educate media people about their profession.
Let's fix this problem. Spread the word.
(A footnote: for the best coverage of this election see Carl Hiaasen's take).
(Update: A version of this essay was published in the the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGCHI Bulletin. Details here.)