rodcorp

Maintenance, or the keeping of too much at hand, having delivered too much

Henry VII passed a law against "maintenance", the keeping at hand of too many male "servants" - contracted men-at-arms, private armies financially retained by powerful noblemen in the power vacuum after the Wars of the Roses. (The word maintenance derives from the Latin manu tenere, to hold in the hand, ie: to keep in a condition of effective functional condition: keeping at hand functionally.)

The visual evidence of this surplus and illegal retainer was the overuse of a nobleman's livery (whereas the visual evidence these days of maintenance, seems to be a spanner - a tool rather than an emblem). In legal terms at least - "retaining", "livery" and "maintenance" seem to have had the same meaning. And the term livery derives from the French livrée, meaning delivered: typically the object or a servant/messenger bore the livery of the noble that owned, retained or had sent them.

Thus maintenance would become a punishment for delivery, which may be a hollow joke for some of us working in technology. And every now and then, when reading contracts, I would like to follow Henry VII's lead and pass a law against maintenance.

Policing news; BlackBerry management tips

The Cabinet Office is providing £75m to get 25,000 mobile devices in the hands of police officers, the funding being managed by the National Policing Improvement Agency. It's quite hard to find consistent coverage of the story in the mainstream press, so we're tracking the story on the Mobbu blog as it unfolds:

• June: 27 Police forces will get £50m for 10,000 mobile devices
• July: Part of the £50m will be spent via NPIA's mobile data accelerator programme
• Sep: More background on the NPIA funding (and of Airwave's investment in Kelvin Connect, and BlackBerry having hit the 20,000 devices mark in UK policing).
• And any day now funding announcement is expected from NPIA for the unallocated £25m. And in the last week, 15 police authorities have revealed that they have money held by embattled or defunct Icelandic banks.

And Alex is starting to post some useful tips on device and application management with BlackBerry Enterprise Manager:

• Application updates not recognised on new BlackBerry devices? - on the benefit of keeping your device and vendor XML files up to date
• Always keep older versions of your Java apps on BES so that your BES can still perform remote management upon those devices that happen to update later then you expected.

Design inviting imagination

The blank slate.

Most mobile companies show devices in use or an indicative user interface on the device. But O2 often present their devices as if they were blank but beautiful slates, ready to display anything or receive the impression of your literate texts. Here's the XDA Mantle, a device aimed at enterprise and field operations with "an in-built fingerprint scanner, so your data stays in safe hands". (Its name evokes safety and a sense of history: mantle-pieces and fireguards, organs that generate protective shell in molluscs, geological structure, orthodox garments...)

Ghosts (outside the machine).

Wheels, a Lego set in the Supplementary range. Sadly, the translucent blue ghosts on the packaging indicate building-potential - grander scenarios that the set might become a constituent part of - rather than the presence of a range of spectral figures, vehicles and structures suitable for restaging Pictish conflicts...

In both cases, blue as a colour indicating possibility.

dConstruct 2007: raise your hopes

Quickly then, two eves and a day of experience, quickly compressed into an undifferentiated slab. In a bar on Brighton's stag night strip: an outdoor terrace packed with familiar and new faces, and a queue on the fire escape to access it. Queues will be cited the next morning. We are in town for dConstruct, a conference on user experience or experience design. Some of what I heard and thought follows and there are poor drawings. Apple and Flickr are good at design, and Microsoft and Nokia and nearly everyone else are not so good. That is law. Being an expert is good, but some things are inexplicable juju - unless you do them a lot, in which case you might become an expert. Queues are a floating signifier: either the hallmark of excellent design or the symptom of ballsed supply chain management. The history of consumer electronics starts with an experiential promise - Eastman (Kodak): "you press the button, we do the rest". This same history has technology giving way to features, and features to experience and simplicity. The history of aerial warfare starts with vision (reconnaissance) and develops towards projected force (machine guns) via a bias for problem-solving instead of solutions-provision (I have no problem with the design takeaway, but wonder if Sven Lindqvist might tell a different history that starts with projected force (bombs from balloons) and ends with panoptic reconnaissance and un-manned strikes). Steve Jobs 1984, 2007: time is even crueller to humans than it is products. Jeff Hawkins: the block of wood story which begat the Palm Pilot = good experience design. But the more interesting question: if the same man and approach was also responsible for the recent Foleo car-crash, then how to make it more likely you'll consistently have product hits? That Flickr started as a feature in a now defunct game is well-known; how does this open-ness to unintended consequences and adaptation tally against the much-cited iPod, whose claimed excellent design derives from an iron-grip on the product and service experience? The father of Waterfall secretly coveted next door's younger baby, Agile. Waterfall as haircut can look good, but as process is bad for designers and humans (well, always?). Reassuringly, user-centred design and agile development can (be made to) live together in perfect harmony. A sofa invites intimacy and anecdote - an unstated Gricean maxim of conversation? Swear-filters invite language reuse; people that write paragraphs like this are clearly utter cranberries. We don't like to offend our computers. Nor our conversations: implicature is what we do in bringing expectations about intentionality and meaning to a conversation, transaction or experience, via a mental model. Your website is not (the limit of) your product: your product reaches out into the network, and this is to be encouraged. Design for always-already reused. Nit-picking: experience/web/internetty design conferences tend to privilege performative and presentational competence, with corresponding risks. That a design proposal can legitimately be called a prototype. That dogma abounds: Apple/experience design good, Microsoft/non-experiental design bad. And that simplicity veneers a necessary complexity. But that's the nature of talks. There wasn't much new content, but the speakers performed really well. I must stop whining from the sides, raise my game and raise my hopes (that courtesy Arthur Davies, via his proud dad). The Market Diner is still a good place to go when the Meat Reaper comes calling in the middle of the night; Bill's is the lunchtime restorative. The event was really well organised by Clearleft and Brighton was in good form. At its social, playful best dConstruct felt like Reboot, and the return to Londra was an ascent back to the surface after a stag night's beer and talk. Good fun thx.

Notes on Reboot9: human?

First time at Reboot, whose theme this year is "Human?", and very enjoyable. I must admit that I treated it more as a holiday than a conference, and hung out in the sun with people, ate many hotdogs sleeved in baguettes, talked shite, drank beer and fisherman's friends, and swore a lot. There are pictures and drawings.

I turned up slightly traumatised, having not quite finished Cormac McCarthy's harrowing but excellent The Road, a post-apocalyptic, post-humous, post-technology - post-everything - vision of hope, fear and death. Its desolation perhaps influenced me to keep my laptop shut for the three days, and I steered clear of the IM/Jaiku/Twitter background radiation.

Notes from some of the talks, my comments in brackets. I'd have to say that there weren't any epiphanic moments for me (possibly because I've been lucky enough to go to the pub many times with several of these presenters in the last year or so), but there was plenty of material to think on.

Tor Nørretranders, keynote

• Humans are willing to lose money to ensure fairness [this sounded optimistic: I thought there was plenty of research suggesting that we're willing to lose money to ensure that other do worse than us. But I might be wrong.]
• Emotions more efficient than intelligence [or as the evolutionary psych people might put it: we have stone age brains]
• People are not things, but flows [cf De Landa]
• 1.5 tonnes of matter passes through us yearly [Who was it that described humans as a pipe for food/shit/sex with legs attached?]
• If 98% of our atoms are replaced yearly, then how does this potato remember my childhood?
• dare/care/share -> attention -> sex, jobs, recognition
• [there follows a techno-utopian description of a return to nature, "the link age" etc, with a hint of Bruno/Viconian cycling of history, back to the hunter-gatherer mode]
• [So if he's prescribing that we increase the flow, should we merely eat more, shit more?]

Adam Arvidsson, Humanism 101 (presentation)

• philosophically humanism [henceforth H] starts with belief in human agency as distinct from Medieval view of destiny-centred world [he's going at 1,000 mph, must... write... faster...]
• humans/humanity to be considered different, [apart from nature, god etc]
• citizens to engage with common cause (res publica)
• individuals increasingly separated from a becoming distant god, applying reason and industry
• humans shape world (agency), consciousness shapes humans (Kant's a priori) [and sudden fear-flashback to university]
• humans qua humans equal; human development is a civ's goal
• relating to humans as subjects (humans as ends not means)
• Modern humanism: shape selves through choices; Sartre: existence before essence
• Empirical anti-H: Freud: ego is not the master - we're not in control of our systems; Marx: humans inside large, uncontrollable structures; Hegel: retrospective [flawed] rationalising; Foucault/Heidegger: man is contingent of/on/from social forces [contrast evol psychology]
• Moral anti-H: H exerts values upon individual = repressive
• Postmodern anti-H: [dead white males etc]
• Eco anti-H: Peter Singer: questions notion that humans should be considered different, in eco context
• Techno anti-H: infotech/biotech greatly complicates H
• Religious underpinning: Christ the universalist: "all who believe in me are saved"; fundamental essence/soul
• "technology is the way (the medium) that Being comes to language" (presents itself) [that's in the manner of Heidegger. Also of Derrida: tech includes language/writing, thus the possibility that language is the way we construct what is real to us]
• book/print-driven Christianity constructed a view of a rationalised, individualised human
• H today: "dividuals rather than individuals"; humanity not as a pre-given essence, but as a project/act. Magic/pragmatism. Acting always in conditions of fundamental insecurity [contingency?]
• thus H as a constructing project, therefore entities with human-ness
• [with the greatest of love and respect to my friends, I enjoyed this talk the most because it was new. Would love to see it expanded. However, would have also liked to have seen Jeremy Keith's Soul (presentation)]

Aram Bartholl, Online symbols in the offline world

• Quake boxes in real life are nice. Pixellated. [sandpaper for the eye]
• first person shooter glasses
• avatar names hovering above you [the helper ensuring they present correctly to the camera, thus to only one point of view in physical space]
• random screen pixel display [classic low-tech to simulate high-tech effort, with tea lights lighting and rotating beer can screens]
• [generally, humorous - projects seem to poke fun at online tropes]

Tom Armitage, Uncanny Valet (presentation)

• protocols documented [less useful], manners vague [more useful]
• UIs set precedent behaviourally [interesting; wanted more on this, and how we might deal with disfunctional behaviour!]
• anthropomorphic representations destroy users' sense of achievement - creepy bellboys [or by babying them]
• Nass - computers as social actors: people treat computers like people [Pace Nass, in speechrec telephony at Eckoh in 2001-3 we found that users want to know that they're talking to a computer, even if our speech recognition/synthesis was good enough to occasionally pass as human. That uncanny valley again.]
• 12:00 - Can't set the clock [at this point I am overcome with a vision of Tarmitage as Frank T.J. Mackey. Respect the clock. Tame the cu-, erm, -ltural manners of your app.]
• breaking frame is rude
• desktop manners are inappropriate for web
• tools adaptive [good], services prescriptive [not so good]
• [some of this stuff seems to build on Webb circa 2005 (no bad thing in my view: building-upon is important), but Tom has taken the material further and presented it well]

Matt Jones, Travel and serendipity and Dopplr

• "travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness" - Mark Twain
• "serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer's daughter"
• can't automate the future, have to declare it [I want a provision for the fuzziness of the future: I might go here. Probably on those dates. Would go there if X did too.]
• "While Twitter isn't our particular coral reef [quoting Winer], we are a creature in a hole on a reef" -  Jones [guppies: oh hai]
• [Matt sounds more Welsh when he talks. In the future, we'll all want to be exotic and Welsh. Q&A very funny. He is a performer.]

Nicolas Nova, Hybridization, fusing, melting, coalescence and salmagundi (presentation)

• [got the schedule all wrong and missed all of this except...]
• elevators had a big effect upon the politics of vertical space. The premium space suddenly goes from the bottom to the top of the bldg
• train schedules and mental models [imagine a heartbeat graph, "value" on the y and time on the x]

Jyri Engestrom, Microblogging

• a spectrum from beat to hum: beat -> videos, blogs, photos, microblogs, presence -> hum
• [again, got the schedule all wrong and missed nearly all of this. Possibly due to being fairly sunburnt and dehydrated by this point.]

Marius Watz, Human lessons from generative art

• [We're looking at Stelarc-style bodymod art pictures whilst nibbling our salmon starter - it's weird]
• [Some very pretty visuals and animations and technically impressive, but it appears to end at process-as-process and spherical-space-looks-better aesthetics. In addition to the aesthetics-plus-process, I want there to be more ideas or narrative underpinning the project or some context/meaningful design embedded in the aesthetics, because the former seems insufficient - or so I've found in my own art work anyway. Many Rebooters absolutely loved Marius's work.]

Sascha Pohflepp, Blinks and buttons

• Tim Hawkinson, Secret Sync [secret clocks]
• camera ubiquity [we are a camera]
• [try polaroid frames on non-polaroid pics]
• archives of experience, exposed
• buttons are machine sensors for the human will [nice reversal, see also XXX in Bleecker's talk]
• Buttons/blind camera gets a picture taken by someone else somewhere else at the same time, but it takes a while to arrive [the received picture as a hyper-invested emotional gift, a souvenir/token, an aide to remembering the moment qua moment]
• Mediamatic's Katharina showed a phone [when?] that turns to find the nearest, but unidentified, friend
• [Pohflepp has an aesthetic of hiding the workings, presenting the product/artobject in a retro-futurist design...]

Marko Ahtisaari on Attention (and Blyk)

• mobile email the most interruptive media (if we're considering how interruptive mobile ads might be) [sadly, he's right: CrackBerries force you to take responsibility for your own actions, how much work and life leak into each other, and many of us find this hard]
• service marketing: users sharing in the value
• what takes attention time: clock, text, call
• Blyk ads will be rich in interaction, not in pixels [understandably vague on biz model details]

Dan Dixon's Quantum Mechanics and Web Design (presentation) I'm very annoyed I missed.

Julian Bleecker, New Interaction Rituals (presentation)

• prehistory of the keyboard: Gilbreths (studied bricklayers, trying to mitigate fatigue)
• Gilbreths' Standard Motions 1919: select, grasp [sounds Heideggery], position, assemble, rest to avoid fatigue, etc
• Apollo 11: astronauts had minimal screens/keyboards so memorised tasks and the inputs they required [cf ChrisH: more buttons on mobile handsets = more sales. Fact.]
• Dan O'Sullivan: humans as seen by a computer: an eyeball and two ears for input and fingers [cf Bartholl above, and I am widget, an inadvertent copy]
• new interaction rituals ... need new computational practices
• how to "expand" the button gesture?

Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity

• 31 art projects, 30 transport [toread!]
• complexity of systems/networks is growing [is it? or is it that we want to map/model more? that we fetishise maps and visualisation?]
• CIA world factbook [has neat words-on-sticks infovis]

Christian Schade's Posthuman I managed to miss whilst collapsed in the sun. Again.

Leisa Reichelt, Ambient Intimacy (presentation)

• cute friendly bee swarms [stinging us with their love, before disappearing forever, leaving us starving and living out McCarthy's The Road]
• AmbInt messages: background, low intensity, warm, short shelf life, personal
• who's inside your monkeysphere? [= sphere of multi-dimensional, ie properly meaningful, contacts]
• exposing more surface area for others to connect with
• Gregory cartoon: "I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to pointless, incessant barking" [a legion of Rebooters look up from their incessant Jaikuing to laugh. I am cynical aren't I? Did you read this far anyway?] [cf other dog/language: We3 GUD DOG; on the internet no-one knows you're a dog; Vexorg, destroyer of worlds]

Matt Webb, Products are people too, keynote (presentation)

• [in the Stewart Brand 6-S layers diagram, what do the thickness of line and freq of arrow mean specifically?]
• perturbation theory - but maybe we can't simply iterate to a solution by starting with utility
• Vac man [still gets laughs]
• [It is so hot that Rebooters are dying in their seats - it's a miracle he was able to stay coherent. Too hot to take notes, I stop and just enjoy the S&W flow.]

OK, enough notes: I am but human.

[With edits for clarity and added linky.]

Mobile posts on the Mobbu blog recently

BlackBerry outage and announcements
RIM's communication needs to improve if its to match the (usual) standard of its product line and service.

Mobile confessions: simplicity and nostalgia
Our fond remembrance of older, simpler mobile handsets is partly a recognition that simple-and-well-done is currently under-served, and partly rose-tinted nostalgia.

Enterprise mobile: on upgrading BlackBerry devices
Technology choice for a project is determined more by the customer’s/project’s context than it is by top-down technology philosophy.

And, erm, nothing to see there about books, art or architecture.

Carnival of the mobilists

This week we're hosting the Carnival of the mobilists over at Mobbu: it's our choice of the week's interesting writing on mobile. As it turned out, lots of stuff about markets and marketing.

I was in my thirties when we went live

On the Mobbu blog recently, we wrote The Long Now of government IT, which offers some notes on how to write proposals for technology-based services that run for 20+ years, and advises not to design 2030’s IT in 2006!

We need to design the data to be extremely permanent if it needs to be kept over the course of the contract. This implies a focus upon resilience and archiving—additionally, the contract negotiation phase should make clear when historic data may be safely erased. We don’t yet know what kind of views we’ll need over the data when it’s a pile 17+ years deep.

Conversely, we should design the components to be extremely replaceable. For instance, there should be sufficient abstraction that we can swap out different components and levels of the solution (eg user interface, databases, infrastructure, application architecture, and so on) as we discover new needs or better ways to do things, or when a new database or data format is mandated at some point in the future.

I ended up heading off on quite a tangent, thinking about long-term organisations and imagining what we'd design if the contract was actually for 250 or 2,500 years rather than 25 or so.

What organisations have longevity? Universities and religions often have better longevity than companies (though sadly, number one on this list of the longest-running family companies has folded; and equally sadly, the famous story about New College Oxford growing oaks specifically to replace its dining hall's structural beams seems apochryphal). Long-surviving religions have the strange but resilient quality of hardly ever being identified with the contexts that they operate in - like the ethnicity/geography/history/culture/political ideology; yet they're still being able to use those contexts to enrich themselves.

Would we design a religion to run this contract?! A religion whose faith and ritual would be oriented around delivering the service. It's an amusing idea, but we know that ceremony and ritual themselves change (see cargo cults and catastrophe fiction for extreme examples). So it might have to be a religion that folded the measurement of its own methods against unwavering goals into its doctrines and religious education. That is to say, the KPIs would have to keep an eye on and correct the KPIs. Difficult...

Let this quote ripped from Eliot's Choruses from The Rock to serve as a caution:

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

But it would be interesting to design an organisation around mechanisms that take advantage of those human universals that do seem to be persistant, like curiosity...

Designing mobile for the public sector

On the Mobbu blog recently: Design principles for public sector and enterprise mobile applications captures a pile of ideas and considerations we've found useful in designing mobile applications for public sector and enterprise customers. The first is allowing local solutions:

Loose constraints allow local solutions
We repeatedly see the value of loose constraints (over rigid workflow) because local solutions either emerge with time, or are there already. So: we design interfaces that are flexible enough to allow users to retain and develop local solutions and customs, whilst remaining contractually compliant. Otherwise the users won’t use the app, and the customer sees no return on investment. See also People over process and IT in mobile workforces.

And these are the other ideas currently:

MIS and reporting might be paramount
Explicit compliance
Applications should work offline
Planning for device heterogeneity
Autosave (vs off-the-record data)
Device security vs user friendliness
Use existing data formats and design models
(Non-)interruptability
Time and geography
Re-broadcast video
Synchronise watches!
Contextual, on-demand help
Building technology appropriately for long-term services

-- We'll be adding to those ideas as we test and refine them.

When do we need offline?

On the Mobbu blog recently: When do we need offline functionality? (Often, for some of us) questions the assumption that every application and all our data should end up in the internet cloud at the other end of an always-on broadband pipe.

You’re on a train going under bridges, through tunnels, switching cells fast enough that your connection might as well be down. Or you’re at a conference with a hundred other laptop users, all sipping the internet down the same straw. You’re in an environment that offers no connection at all: some airplanes, many large corporate or public buildings. You’re visiting a company which bathes its office in plentiful wifi, but won’t open it up to visitors like you...

And, of course, it's good to switch off the pipe sometimes.