Monday, November 28, 2005

EmPhatic gadgets



Interesting article about phatic gadgets in Gizmodo today by a designer at Frog Design. These are gadgets that facilitate passing and non-demanding interactions, through wireless or other networks. We use these things sometimes for their entertainment value, sometimes for their connectivity, and presumably for their popularity. Not much point in having a Tomagotchi nobody else can take care of.

One could view each gadget platform as a gateway to a social network of a particular type and (content) theme. The device then is not just a stand-alone, but has social attributes, social "form factors."

"Phatic interactions abound in the wired community space as well. The advent of camera phones and sites like Flickr only reinforce the trend to moblog the world with mundane photographs. We are wired to connect socially with others, so of course sharing photos is addictive." Tamagotchi to Xbox: Why The World Can't Resist Phatic Technologies

But there's a difference between the communications that devices provide, and those that are sent us by our friends. A quick text "hello" is a friendly greeting, or an inquiry perhaps as to how we're doing, or gesture that reaches out to say "hey, haven't heard from you in a while, and this is a low-intensity, low-risk, and non-obligatory request to reconnect..." A message provided by the device's own application, on the other hand, is a kind of proxy communication. An imitation of interpersonal interaction. It may lead to real communication, coordination (in gaming, of which Tomagotchi's are an example), or some other social interaction, or not.

Erving Goffman called these small gestures acts of "civil inattention"—means by which to acknowledge others without demanding that they engage with us back. Goffman's observation that it can be the smallest daily rituals, and the seemingly least informative and most cliched and empty gestures that ritually serve as a social adhesive, was a hallmark of his work.
When it comes to phatic technologies, the issue is really about how we relate to mediated, proxy messaging and communication.

What does it mean to have a device say "hello"? Should we regard that as a signalling design element? Or is it more, as the article suggests? And if it is—if we relate in some more meaningful and "human" way to devices that speak and signal and gesture the small things to us—where do we draw the line between noise and signal, between cute and annoying?

Provided we know the language, every communication suggests appropriate responses. Our responses to phatic gadgets are bound by the same rules. Phatic device design raises some fascinating issues for social interaction designers, because the devices function in a kind of Venn overlap between social interaction and interface. In fact, the distinction between the two domains touches at the heart of the social and the technical. It'll be our job to find a happy medium between the two.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Careful with that interface, Eugene

I've got to admit that in all these years I've never read any Harold Garfinkel, and that *that* was an oversight! If you are in design, and have not read Garfinkel, don't walk, run, to get his Studies in Ethnomethodology. Or better, his Ethnomethodology's Program.
And now for something completely different.
There is in Niklas Luhmann's systems theory the notion that all system comunication is a selection. Selections create two possibility's for the system's autopoesis: a yes and a no. The world is doubled up in two alternative futures. What follows is action. Action on the yes, or on the no.
It occurred to me, and this doesnt require Luhmann, that all interface design involves presenting the user with yes and no options. And all software applications of course need unambiguous user selections. There's no "maybe" button in between the submit and cancel (how i've wished for a dialog box to present me a "submit" and "resist" alternative).
What makes social interaction design interesting, and the reason i call it the "social interface" and not the user interface, is that in human communication there is an ambiguity presented by human communication that rubs against the binary selections set up in the software design. Where human communication often consists of the very process of resolving that ambiguity through interaction, thus coming to know the Other, the design of user interfaces forces users to make unambiguous selections and choices. When the application is some kind of social software, be it for dating, auctioning, career networking, etc., the user experience splits along two axes: interactions with other users; and interactions with the system. It's here that we need to develop, and I think with ethnomethodological approaches, an understanding of social interaction design. The phenomena under study is going to be hard to nail down; and its complexity may be too difficult to describe adequately, but i'm convinced that design of communication technology can no longer stop at the screen.
Stay tuned.

Monday, November 14, 2005

A Mutual Friend : Mobile phones and art by Blast Theory (UK)


I met these guys at Banff years ago at an Interactive Screen (back in Sara Diamond daze)... Artists are in the fortunate position to plumb the relations between technology and society, technology and culture, concept, and so on. Make me jealous. Blast theory were doing VR wargame stuff, and had become notorious for a kidnapping they held in London (i think) for which they sold raffle tix! The hostage was held in a wooden box and broadcast online via webcam... It was the inverse of reality tv: a common citizen volunteering to be kidnapped for the sake of art, and publicized as that art.

I grabbed these quotes from Nick's project on cell phones and social relations. It captures the difficulty of mapping the interplay of technology, social relations, and concepts of society/social reproduction. We often pull out communication technology as something special. Similar to architecture, say, but different its dynamics. Technologies are objects, but they're not dumb, static, and stable. They're conduits and mediators. And when they're mobile, it seems that they lift us even further out of our social fabric. But interpersonal connections, social relations, and relationships involve what we call "meaning." In sociology, meaning occupies a particular place: it's not a thing. It's a binding. And when it's produced out of talk, it combines linguistic meanings as well as interpersonal relations (the I'm OK, You're OK stuff).

Technologies are as much a part of our cities as our buildings. Networks, wired or wireless, matter as much as the matter they span and the matters they handle... But technologies are not architecture, and social relations are not spatial (the misnomer "social space"). If the hard stuff is first order technology and interaction, the soft stuff is second order effect. Where the former involves a user interface, the latter involves a social interface. When we go from users to social practices we lose access to the building materials we're used to. I'd like to see more on temporality, and how devices like the mobile phone transform experience along the temporal axis: the asynchronicity of text/sms vs talk; the effect of distractions, interruptions, and fragmentation of continuity. More, too, on presence negotiation -- how we manage others' access to us, expectations of our availability, and of course the ambiguity of absence and silence, delays, and waiting... Here, too, presence involves time as much as it does space. Note, too, that space is not place. Sociologist Anthony Giddens is good on this: place and location are marked by social/cultural meanings; space is empty.

This is tough stuff, and I don't think it's adequately covered in design programs, but it's the critical dimension, and so as long as it's where we're itchy we might as well scratch.

Wouldn't it be fun to work on an art project?



From Mutual Friend:

"Increased mobility has brought about an increasingly disjointed relationship to physical and social space. The transit from home to driveway > car > side street > bypass > industrial estate to workplace and back can be sparsely populated. Public spaces are more likely to be areas of transit, weariness and solitude than of easy sociability, participation, frankness and debate.

The mobile phone has had an ambiguous role in these spaces, at once, providing a means to feel safe and talk to friends, while disrupting your attachment to those around you."

From Mutual Friend's workshop ideas http://www.amutualfriend.co.uk/html/workshop/workshop_intro_ideas.html

"These are some odd questions and ideas that have been part of our thinking in developing this work.

How does the geography of a city relate to someone's experience in it?
What are the important structures and landmarks of the city?
How can a meaningful narrative be generated by mapping someone's route?

Physical Spaces:
- its arrangements of living & working spaces
- forms of transport
- layouts of buildings and provision of public spaces

Virtual/electronic & media spaces made visible through:
- public electronic interfaces & billboards
- mobile devices and networks
- personal computers at home & work
- phones and mobile phones

Social Spaces:
- what networks of communication are sustained?
- what rules & social codes are attached to particular locations?
- what are the stories and key characters that inform how people experience public space?"

Friday, November 11, 2005

Social interactions scale uniquely

Social experiences and interactions scale uniquely. Which is just one reason that social interaction design needs to pay close attention to the intervention of technology in communication and interaction. A new feature at an online community, for example, not only changes interactions between two users. Those changes scale up, introducing a new understanding of "what's going on", and of how to proceed.... Some outlined thoughts here:

• Individual user experience: Ambiguities in communication: what’s intended, how to respond or reply, what comes next, when is it over, etc.
• Group user experience: ambiguities of communication, intent, context, interaction and so forth are scaled, and produce interpersonal and relational ambiguities among members of the group, team, etc.
• Macro social repercussions: ambiguities introduced by the mediation of communication by technology produce confusion, loss of purpose, misunderstanding, anomie, and possibly some amount of social disintegration.

• Individual user experience: Competency issues, such as interface problem, how to use technology features and functions, as well as how to extend those into practices to make them even more valuable
• Group user experience: incompetency with the technology and mediated process leads to ineffectual communication, inefficiencies of information transfer, activity coordination, knowledge production, transaction execution and verification, and so on.
• Macro social repercussions: incompetency with technology use produces communication failures and lost opportunities to successfully circulate messages and social claims.

• Individual user experience: Degrees of participation in the technology or practice, from light usage to compulsive behavior
• Group user experience: differences of degree of participation among users of a technology leads to imbalances within a group, team, or other collectivity of role practice and adoption, task completion, group communication, maintenance of organizational structure and individual positions within it, and so on.
• Macro social repercussions: imbalances lead to damage to organizational, institutional, and social hierarchies, authorities, roles, and their functional contribution to social cohesion.

• Individual user experience: Transitivity, or the degree to which a user allows communication to flow through him or her (whether actively or passively).
• Group user experience: resistance to transitivity or breakdowns in flow of communication produce group or team communication failures, dead end messaging and interaction, isolated but not shared successes, and so on.
• Macro social repercussions: lost and broken communication cripples decision-making and follow-through at the level of macro societal processes.

• Individual user experience: Displacement of individual and personal communication issues onto technologies, and vice versa.
• Group user experience: communication mix-ups and misunderstandings caused by the confusion of interpersonal and technical issues leads to lost group or team cooperation, misunderstandings, conflict, and compromised attempts to resolve them.
• Macro social repercussions: confusion of interpersonal and technical communication and its effects demands additional conflict resolution and efforts directed a social processes.

• Individual user experience: Stresses induced by expectations imposed by and through use of technology, as well as by unexplained inconsistencies, resistances, and other individual and social use issues.
• Group user experience: stresses on individuals lead to group or team dysfunctionality resulting from displaced attempts to mitigate stress (which result in confusion of group or team cohesion and process).
• Macro social repercussions: stresses result in a need to address their symptoms and effects, thus committing social energies to the place explicit attention on byproducts of ineffective communication.

Monday, November 07, 2005

Civilization and its mis/mal/dis/contents

"Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate." Remember that one? It was repurpased from computer manuals by students during late 60s protests (in Canada, I think) and became a tagline for the student protest movement.

We are not information. And yet we produce and consume information in overwhelming quantities. Systems theory teaches that one of the functions of a system is information selection. Humans and systems use and select different kinds of information. Humans permit ambiguities; systems not. The ambiguities we deal with often relate to persons, their motives, personalities, relations, etc. That type of information, called "meaning" in the social sciences, is of a different kind than information-data insofar as it involves understanding reached between persons. Computers don't have to understand each other in order to function properly.

We're laying down the basics of next generation web and internet protocols. The handling of persons is not the same as the handling of information. It's not necessary to clear up ambiguities among people to make communication technologies efficient. It'll be a challenge, though an interesting one, to see how we design web 2.0 and other social software and related protocols to handle persons. Not everything is Googleable.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Social Software: Sociable, Social, Societal, or which is it?

I may be scratching where it doesn't itch, but I'm feeling itchy and I've been scratching so I'm going to go with it. After months of working on a paper about what I call "social interaction design," I've recently been getting caught up on my reading. I've noticed a tendency, in the numerous conversations online about social software, to use analogies and metaphors as a means by which to uncover and explain social software, what it is and where it's headed. And I've been scratching my head. This might just be academic, but I'm bothered by a need for discipline and rigor in our terminologies and theories of social software.

Because we're talking about technologies, we have a tendency to want to describe social software in terms of what it does. So we attach predicates like "social" to software, and suddenly a new breed of technology exists. But all software is useless without its users, and their practices of use. And that social software now describes countless companies, sites, communities, appliations, tools, etc., doesn't put them all in the same category. Furthermore, our adoption of these technologies doesn't mean that we're becoming more social, whatever that would mean (though there is a strong contingent of thought out there in favor of the democratizing and decentralizing trend of social software, and I'm all for it).

Some technologies and tools facilitate interactions. They might be dyadic (one to one, e.g. IM), group, or community. Therein are already three different degrees of "social." Actually, paired interaction stands out as a special case (is a phone social?).

Some technologies connect users/individuals and facilitate networking, through connectivity, protocols, boundary and connection definitions, etc.

Some technologies facilitate transactions, P2P file-sharing, auctioning, classifieds, etc.

Some technologies facilitate journaling/blogging, talking, discussing, e.g. a text version of talk.

And there are many more, of course, centered on KM, distance learning, dating, you name it. And we haven't even mentioned mobile media.

There is what a thing does, and there is the practice in which it is embedded. A technology used for interaction isn't, IMHO, necessarily socializing. And in fact there's a substantial distinction in order here between social and societal, the latter having a degree of organization not belonging to the former. Norms, rules, conventions, games, rituals, economies -- these to me involve societal organization and culture. Social software in which we find these attributes has some degree of societal organization. However, I'd say that social software apps focused on quick and thin interactions (perhaps the 43 family, IM/chat tools, blogging) are better understood as interactional than they are social.

I'm even confused on what a connective application is. Some social software claims to be social simply because it employs personal profiles and hyperlinks by which members can "link" to one another. What's meant then by a link? The hyperlink, a simple, bi-directional association, has in common usage become a personal link. Connection > connected > connectivity.... and soon it's a social network and next thing you know it's a culture or community.

Problem is that social networks don't capture the nature of relations. Affinities are not associations are not affiliations are not filiations (family) are not alliances etc. Each of those terms describes a different type of human relation. I may belong to set( Deadheads) based on a history of donning the tie dye and poking the air for miracle tickets in paved parking lots. Am I connected to Deadheads if I post to a deadshow downloading site? But do I have more in common with Tribesters or Friendsters if I share movie reviews with them in online discussions, having never met them? A friend of mine was recently using her iBook in a cafe when a stranger came up to her and asked "Are you Susannah? Because everybody here can see your computer on the network." That made her a temporary member of a nodal community I guess. By our logic and habit we'd say something like that--the simple fact of her co-presence in a dropdown menu of networked machines having more apparent social significance than the fact that she had a co-present interaction with another person!

Yes I'm a bit confused. I do think that social software is happening, I know that connectivity is happening, and that computing and communication technologies are merging. I'm looking for granularity though, because to understand how we use social software, to see where it's most valuable, how it transforms social and cultural relations (look simply to the Libby indictment and you'll see turmoil in what's private, what's public, who's a journalist, a blogger, what's a crime, and a right), we need to distinguish technologies by their functions, user practices, modes of interaction (voice, sight, text), and secondary effects (epiphenomena). Analogies at best describe what they seem to be, so they have some descriptive value, but they are neither explanatory nor prescriptive. ...