This is a compressed version of an IM-Interview with Matt Jones (by Ryan Freitas of AdaptivePath, March 2007). I'm re-publishing it here a sort of - quite fascinating - essay. The full version is
here. --
Well - let’s dial back the Delorean a little to Jyri’s coinage of “social objects.” He was coming at it from social science, specifically “Actor-Network Theory” where sociologists consider everything to act on everything else - people, environments, tools, and consider these systems to understand how people socialise with each other, mediated by tools, objects, environments etc. So the ’social object’ in Jyri’s thinking is the centre of gravity of some social transaction. And it’s also the trigger… and the transmitter of sociality. The canonical case being a photo in Flickr.
It functions as both artifact and instigator. In dopplr’s case it’s the “trip.”An information wake as it’s been called.
I guess the interesting thing we’re coming to see is that the ‘placing on the network’ is becoming less of a conscious act, and more the default state
Dopplr is about the future. [As a user,] you’re creating a model of the future - a proposal of behaviour if you like. That becomes the social object. Part of the sociality is negotiating and changing that - optimising it before it happens. Which is a little bit of what my talk is going to address - the act of making models together.
By participating in these communities, are are we in some sense commoditizing our behavior? While we’re experiencing it through the proscenium arch of the laptop - maybe. But we’re seeing the ‘everting of cyberspace’ into the real world as William Gibson put it. I’d take the example of Twitter at conferences compared to twitter as chatroom.
[I]t doesn’t help that the formfactors and UI of the devices we have still make us dive through the screen. Our devices compete with the world for our attention. [But our] services are starting to complement the world and our attention… at least they are taking the first baby-steps. The UIs aren’t there yet in most cases. But now we have service designers creating things that give timely amplification to our knowledge, decision making capabilities, sense of the world around us. I’m pretty hopeful actually. I posted something to my blog a little while back about this in terms of UIs that allow us to scamper up and down the attention scale. You can see hints of them in little disconnected piles right now.
[L]ast year at SxSWi I was talking about the mobile as a stub-maker / iceberg-tickler:
- Stub-maker - create a small mark that I like this thing, I need to do this later, I want to remember this.
- Iceberg-tickler - give me just the right cupful of the iceberg right now. And those are the sorts of services that are emerging for mobile.
And its happening much faster now that iphone fever has swept the valley.
[So here, with the iPhone, have we got one of Warren Ellis’ “genuine outbreaks of the future”?] Possibly.
[... the danger of “lost futures,” based on the success of a given device. ... other, more interesting ways of looking at the problem get cast aside… or at least ignored ...] [T]he gravity well of the iPhone is going to be hard for anyone developing innovative UIs to escape for the next few years. In hardware, you’re subject to the determinism of sourcing components
Exactly - the gravity well of the iPhone is going to be hard for anyone developing innovative UIs to escape for the next few years. In hardware, you’re subject to the determinism of sourcing components. UIs will not be so diverse in the next few years… inside a BigDeviceCo you’re going to find it hard to justify the investment in the out-there stuff (as always). But there’s still innovation a plenty to come, its just that for the next few years it’ll be all 16:9 touchscreens, I guess. And then… hopefully someone will Wii on their parade and breakthrough with something as different as the iPhone was to the existing crop of smartphones. That’s my hope anyway. And I think it might be in the area of physical/gestural interfaces, matched with ambient/visualisation tech to give us more natural ‘Everyware‘. I think there are already some awesome things being developed by people like Julian Bleeker for instance in this realm of possibility - he’s making reference designs for physical/digital/personal ‘toys’ and devices.
These are the things that interest me greatly - ‘personal informatics’. Imagine RescueTime extending off the desktop. Scary perhaps… I remember BodyMedia from a few years back and people being terrified of it. I wonder if they are more accepting now? “We’re all policemen now” as Mr. Morrison said. Self-sousveillance for all. We find data about ourselves - these patterns, somehow affirming.
[RF: It's about perfect self-knowledge. All of this data is hidden from us, and we’re the one’s generating it… we aren’t equipped, cognitively, to learn anything more than impressions from our own actions. In attempting to gather more complete pictures of our behaviors.]
... coming back to the social aspect. The overlays of these patterns with those of others are a new kind of feedback we haven’t had at any scale before. And we do flock well. So perhaps that’s how we will learn and change our behaviours… in a “supercontext” if you will… [wink]
[ed note, RF: In his groundbreaking comic book series, The Invisibles, Grant Morrison posited the "supercontext" as a sort of existence/construct that humanity is evolving toward. Within it, the bounds of ego and identity loosen up (we merge into one another) and time becomes something we can traverse like distance, dipping into and out of any moment in our lives at will.]
RF: Given your presentations on spacetime, Morrison’s supercontext (and time travel in general) seem pertinent to Dopplr. Morrison had a variety of means by which his characters moved through time ... With Dopplr, are you building your very own timetravel device ...
[As interaction designers, ] We’d like to increase joy, ideally. But we’ve a long way to go with air travel there… “Commodity, firmness and delight” - as Vitruvius said. In that order.
[Design methods as] singularities that just form from everything and nothing. ... You can pretend you have a process and sometimes process is the magic, the invocation you need to get those points to appear. But sometimes they will just come out of the foam. I think the weird thing is that process is seen as something for reducing risk and increasing the reproduction of predictable results. Whereas I’m more inspired by process that creates something unexpected.
[W]hatever you think of Ideo [Jen Learnard ], ‘Build to think’ is a pretty fantastic way of incapsulating that thought. And it’s cheaper than thinking now [nose wink] With mobile it’s essential, and yet hard to do.
[RF: As a Dopplr user, I’m creating trips, negotiating details - and then the ineffable march of time brings me to these social objects I’ve created and translates them into experience. ... The experience complete, I am left with a (massively valuable) trace of my movement in spacetime. ... I keep generating trips, and my context is forced to move forward, and so what I end up with is a constant forward to back stream of data to explore and optimize. If dopplr is the stream, there’s a missing piece, from my perspective. Something to navigate the stream with.]
I think if you look to some of the Glory-ous work of Stamen in things like Trulia Hindsight you get ideas about UI for poring over the past. Looking for patterns and instances. Interfaces for ‘poring-over’ is something I’m very interested in.
