April 2005 Archives

I've had this on my computer for some weeks. Now that I've had some time to think, I'm less grumpy. But still mildly upset.

I had a difficult time at CHI this year – I am doing research that’s more directly tied to products right now, and felt disconnected from the other researchers there. Or rather – felt disconnected from the researchers doing the kind of work I’m not doing any more. If you know what I mean.

So I felt mildly discontented, which is easy at CHI. Along with stimulating and disseminating really thoughtful stuff, the academic publishing industry also creates a lot of fake rigor: work that sounds legit but is actually half-baked. Not that half-bakery is always a problem - one reason the ivory tower exists is to engender madly inventive and wildly unprofitable ideas and sustain them long enough to excite the rest of the world. It’s the dull, plodding half-bakery of HCI that annoys me – the three-day lab trials that apparently all use the same twelve undergrads, the humorless analyses of common online interactions that conclude by confirming the obvious, the hastily-written up observations of the author’s co-workers at summer jobs.

I’m grumpy and feeling alienated. And I know it. But hasty publishing doesn’t do the projects any favors – no matter how good the citations look on the authors’ resumes.

I did have a good time at Michele’s workshop. It was interesting to see people’s favorite design methods/obsessions mapped to a city I’m beginning to know well.

And the most fascinating moments of the entire week came at the end, with Michel Waisvisz from STEIM on electronic music, gestural interfaces, and the makeable world:

This instrument is like an oracle – it feeds me surprises and allows me to respond

Simple interfaces allow for mastery

You do not own the product you cannot build

Which brings me, unsurprisingly, to poetry. On my way around the city, doing my part to help a friend drop off 2500 matchbooks for an art project, I went into a bookstore and saw this final word from William Blake on the power (and frustration) of working with computers:

I must Create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's.

Brazil forwards the academic dialogue as usual with an HCI program in semiotic engineering. From a related book

Semiotics is the study of signs, and the essence of semiotic engineering is the communication between designers and users at interaction time; designers must somehow be present in the interface to tell users how to use the signs that make up a system or program.

I'm not entirely sure what that means. But that probably means I should just...read the book already.

I prefer mailing lists to weblogs as I think that mailing lists force you to interact with people with whom you do not want to interact. This, for me, is the definition of social. To be social means to negotiate social spaces.

Lisa Gye

Portland has plenty of bizarre wifi nodes, including strip clubs (yes, I've already made that joke about "laptops") and bathhouses (ditto the joke about "hotspots"). I think that BMW's plan to put wifi access points in BMW dealerships is just as dubious (although not as dubious as this laughable publicity stunt) .

Part of the reason these new access points seem so odd to me is that they're being discussed solely in terms of mobile workers with laptops - regardless of the actual way these spaces are being used. The scenarios are technology-centric, not place-centric or even person-centric. Which is obviously kind of dumb, since it's people who use wifi networks, not the other way around. And I still don't understand the use of a laptop in a strip club. Wouldn't it get in the way?

Here's the funny thing, though. By putting in free nodes, the business owners are trusting that someone will find a use for them. And if they maintain the nodes long enough, someone will. It just might not be the expected mobile worker with a laptop. If you envision a future landscape populated with a diverse set of devices - some laptop-sized, some smaller, some larger - the possible uses for these funny wifi nodes look very different. I don't know what these devices might look like (hopefully not much like current PDAs) - but to me the nodes look like the beginnings of an infrastructure for mobile players, not just mobile workers.