So is it as if it had never been?  I there anything left behind?  There are a few sheets of Magic Whiteboard on the walls, that I left so that those visiting the Rural Centre in the coming weeks can see something of what we were doing, and there are used teabags and fish-and-chip boxes in the bin, but few traces.

We trod lightly, like the agriculture of the island, where Corncrake and orchid live alongside sheep and cattle.

Some may have heard me talk about the way design is like a Spaghetti Western. In the beginning of the film Clint Eastwood walks into the town, and at the end walks away.  He does not stay, happily ever after, with a girl on his arm, but leaves almost as if nothing had ever happened.

But while he, like the designer, ultimately leaves, things are not the same.  The Carson brothers who had the town in fear for years lie dead in their ranch at the edge of town, the sharp tang of gunfire still in the air and the buzz of flies slowly growing over the elsewise silent bodies.  The crooked major, who had been in the pocket of the Carson brothers, is strapped over a mule heading across the desert towards Mexico, and not a few wooden rails and water buts need to be repaired.  The job of the designer is not to stay, but to leave, but leave change: intervention more than invention.

But the deepest changes are not those visible in the bullet-pocked saloon door, but in the people.  The drunk who used to sit all day at the bar, has discovered that he is not just a drunk, but he is a man, and the barmaid, who used to stand behind the bar has discovered that she is not just a barmaid, but she is a woman.

This is true of the artefacts we create and leave behind as designers, but much more so of the events, which come and go through our lives.  It is not so much the material traces they leave in the environment, but the changes in ourselves.

I know that, as the plane and ferry left with those last participants, a little of myself left with them, and I know many, probably all, felt a little of themselves left behind on Tiree.  This is partly abut the island itself; indeed I know one participant was already planning a family holiday here and another was looking at Tiree houses for sale on RightMove!  But it was also the intensity of five, sometimes relaxed, sometimes frenetic, days together.

So what did we do?

There was no programme of twenty minute talks, no keynotes or demo, indeed no plan nor schedule at all, unusual in our diary-obsessed, deadline-driven world.

Well, we talked.  Not at a podium with microphone and Powerpoint slides, but while sitting around tables, while walking on the beach, and while standing looking up at Tilly, the community wind turbine, the deep sound of her swinging blades resonating in our bones.  And we continued to talk as the sun fell and the overwhelmingly many stars came out , we talked while eating, while drinking and while playing (not so expertly) darts.

We met people from the island those who came to the open evening on Saturday, or popped in during the days, and some at the Harvest Service on Sunday.  We met Mark who told us about the future plans for Tiree Broadband, Jane at PaperWorks who made everything happen, Fiona and others at the Lodge who provided our meals, and many more. Indeed, many thanks to all those on the island who in various ways helped or made those at TTW feel welcome.

We also wrote.  We wrote on sheets of paper, notes and diagrams, and filled in TAPT forms for Clare who was attempting unpack our experiences of peace and calmness in the hope of designing computer systems that aid rather than assault our solitude.  Three large Magic Whiteboard sheets were entitled “I make because …”, “I make with …”, “I make …” and were filled with comments.  And, in these days of measurable objectives, I know that at least a grant proposal, book chapter and paper were written during the long weekend; and the comments on the whiteboards and experiences of the event will be used to create a methodological reflection of the role of making in research which we’ll put into Interfaces and the TTW web site.

We moved.  Walking, throwing darts, washing dishes, and I think all heavily gesturing with our hands while taking.  And became more aware of those movements during Layda’s warm-up improvisation exercises when we mirrored one another’s movements, before using our bodies in RePlay to investigate issues of creativity and act out the internal architecture of Magnus’ planned digital literature system.

We directly encountered the chill of wind and warmth of sunshine, the cattle and sheep, often on the roads as well as in the fields.  We saw on maps the pattern of settlement on the island and on display boards the wools from different breeds on the island. Some of us went to the local historical centre, An Iodhlann [[ http://www.aniodhlann.org.uk/ ]], to see artefacts, documents and displays of the island in times past, from breadbasket of the west of Scotland to wartime airbase.

We slept.  I in my own bed, some in the Lodge, some in the B&B round the corner, Matjaz and Klem in a camper van and Magnus – brave heart – in a tent amongst the sand dunes.  Occasionally some took a break and dozed in the chairs at the Rural Centre or even nodded off over a good dinner (was that me?).

We showed things we had brought with us, including Magnus’ tangle of wires and circuit boards that almost worked, myself a small pack of FireFly units (enough to play with I hope in a future Tech Wave), Layda’s various pieces she had made in previous tech-arts workshops, Steve’s musical instrument combining Android phone and cardboard foil tube, and Alessio’s impressively modified table lamp.

And we made.  We do after all describe this as a making event!  Helen and Claire explored the limits of ZigBee wireless signals.  Several people contributed to an audio experience using proximity sensors and Arduino boards, and Steve’s CogWork Chip: Lego and electronics, maybe the world’s first mechanical random-signal generator.  Descriptions of many of these and other aspects of the event will appear in due course on the TTW site and participants’ blogs.

But it was a remark that Graham made as he was waiting in the ferry queue that is most telling.  It was not the doing that was central, the making, even the talking, but the fact that he didn’t have to do anything at all.  It was the lack of a plan that made space to fill with doing, or not to do so.

Is that the heart?  We need time and space for non-doing, or maybe even un-doing, unwinding tangles of self as well as wire.

There will be another Tiree Tech Wave in March/April, do come to share in some more not doing then.

Who was there:

• Alessio Malizia – across the seas from Madrid, blurring the boundaries between information, light and space
• Helen  Pritchard – artist, student of innovation and interested in cows
• Claire  Andrews – roller girl and researching the design of assistive products
• Clare  Hooper – investigating creativity, innovation and a sprinkling of SemWeb
• Magnus  Lawrie – artist, tent-dweller and researcher of digital humanities
• Steve Gill – designer, daredevil and (when he can get me to make time) co-authoring book on physicality TouchIT
• Graham Dean – ex-computer science lecturer, ex-businessman, and current student and auto-ethnographer of maker-culture
• Steve Foreshaw - builder, artist, magician and explorer of alien artefacts
• Matjaz Kljun – researcher of personal information and olive oil maker
• Layda Gongora – artist, curator, studying improvisation, meditation and wild hair
• Alan Dix – me

However, as an author myself (albeit academic) this seems to completely miss the reasons for the publishing industry.  The printing of physical volumes has long been a minimal part of the value, indeed traditional publishers have made good use of the changes in physical print industry to outsource actual production.  The core value for the author are the things around this: marketing, distribution and payment management.

Of these, distribution is of course much easier now with the web, whether delivering electronic copies, or physical copies via print-on demand services.  However, the other core values persist – at their best publishers do not ring fence the public from the author, but on the contrary connect the two.

I recall as a child being in the Puffin Club and receiving the monthly magazine.  I could not afford many books at the time, but since have read many of the books described in its pages and recall the excitement of reading those reviews.  A friend has a collection of the early Puffins (1-200) in their original covers; although some stories age, some are better, some worse, still just being a Puffin Book was a pretty good indication it was worth reading.

The myth we are being peddled is of a dis-intermediated networked world where customers connect directly to suppliers, authors to readers¹, musicians to fans.  For me, this has some truth, I am well enough known and well enough connected to distribute effectively.  However for most that ‘direct’ connection is mediated by one of a small number of global sites … and smaller number of companies: YouTube, Twitter, Google, iTunes, eBay, not to forget Amazon.

For publishing as in other areas, what matters is not physical production, the paper, but the route, the connection, the channel.

And crucially Kindle is not just the device, but the channel.

The issue is not whether Kindle kills the publishing industry, but whether Amazon becomes the publishing industry.  Furthermore, if Amazon’s standard markdown and distribution deals for small publishers are anything to go by, Amazon is hardly going to be a cuddly home for future authors.

To some extent this is an apparently inexorable path that has happened in the traditional industries, with a few large publishing conglomerates buying up the smaller publishing houses, and on the high street a few large bookstore chains such as Waterstones, Barnes & Noble squeezing out the small bookshops (remember “You’ve Got Mail“), and it is hard to have sympathy with Waterstones recent financial problems given this history.

Philip Jones of the Bookseller recently blogged about these changes, noting that it is in fact book selling, not publishing that is struggling with profits … even Amazon – no wonder Amazon want more of the publishing action.  However, while Jones notes that the “digital will lead to smaller book chains, stocking fewer titles” in fact “It wasn’t digital that drove this, but it is about to deliver the coup de grâce.”

Which does seem a depressing vision both as author and reader.

1. Maybe unbound.co.uk is actually doing this – see Guardian article, although it sounds more useful to the already successful writer than the new author. [back]

It would be nice to think that the UK had learnt from the Shetland case, but sadly not.  Earler this year the Government released its interim Digital Britain report. This starts well declaring “The success of our manufacturing and services industries will increasingly be defined by their ability to use and develop digital technologies“; however the sum total of its action plan to promote ‘Digital Content’ is to strengthen IP protection.  Whatever one’s views on copyright, file sharing etc., the fact that a digital economy is a global economy seems to have somehow been missed on the way; and this is the UK’s “action plan to secure the UK’s place at the forefront of innovation, investment and quality in the digital and communications industries”³.

1. See “Copyright battles: The Shetlands” @ Ariadne and “Scottish Court Orders Online Newspaper to Remove Links to Competitor’s Web Site” @ Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. [back]
2. and for that matter, more recent cases like the ‘wish list’ patent [back]
3. UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport Press Release 106/08 “Digital Britain – the future of communications” 17th October 2008 [back]

Tags are of course becoming ubiquitous in the digital world: Flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarks; at the digital/physical boundary: RFID and barcodes; and in the physical world: supermarket price stickers, luggage labels and images of Paddington Bear or wartime evacuees each with a brown paper label round their necks. Indeed we started off the day being given just such brown paper tags to design labels for ourselves.

As well as being labels so we know each other, they were also used as digital identifiers using a mobile-phone-based image-recognition system, which has been used in a number of projects by the project team at Edinburgh (see some student projects here). We could photograph each others tags with our own phones, MMS the picture to a special phone number, then a few moments later an SMS message would arrive with the other person’s profile.

Being focused on a single topic and even single word ‘tag’ soon everything begins to be seen through the lens of “tagging”, so that when we left the building and saw a traffic warden at work outside the building, instantly the thought came “tagging the car”!

The workshop covered loads of ground and included the design and then construction of a real application – part of the project’s methodology of research through design. However, two things that I want to write about. The first is the way the workshop made me think about the ontology or maybe semiology of tags and tagging, and the second is a particular tag (or maybe label, notice?) … on a toilet door … yes the good old British scatological obsession.

String and The Semiology of Tags

We filled sheets full of key terms with arrows and lines between them, but for me one of the key concepts was the string that ties a paper tag to whatever is being tagged. Of course the string is itself simply an emblem: for a price sticker it is the glue and for a Graffiti artist it is the act of painting. However, the crucial thing about the string (or sticky, or whatever), is that it joins tag to tagged.

Because the string joins the tag to the tagged it emphasises the ancillary role of the tag. The tag s not part of the tagged thing, but a add-on, an annotation, or in a Semantic Web world, meta-data.

The tag itself is usually in some way conveying information – in classic semiotics it is a sign. In the case of iconic or textual tags (for example, a price tag) a sign to be directly interpreted by the observer, in the case of digital tags (such as a barcode, or RFID tag) an identifier that is associated with further information, or sometimes both, as was the case with the application that recognised our hand crafted name tags.

The act of sticking or tying a tag onto a physical object, or digitally tagging a photo in Flickr, at one level binds the tag to the tagged object. However, the binding of tag to tagged is not just an association between them, otherwise every knot tying would be a tagging. The crucial thing is that by tying the tag to the tagged an implicit relationship is created between the tagged and thing or concept signified by the tag. In the case of a tied-on tag, the string is the physical representation of the relationship.

The thing signified by the tag and the relationship signified by the string may be of many kinds:

In the case of a tag on a cow’s ear or a brand on a slave the thing signified is a person and the relationship is ownership.

• In the case of a price label, the thing denoted is the money and the relationship cost.
• For tagged images in Flickr, the signified thing is some sort of concept or category and the relationship establishes that thing is (or is believed to be) of the signified category.
• For the evacuee children or destination labels on luggage, the signified is place and the relationship “is going to”.

In some case it may be better to think of the thing signified as a predicate or property and the relationship imputed by the string (or sticking) as ‘satisfies the predicate’. The security stickers on luggage or the frank on a letter does this saying “this luggage has been checked” or “this letter has been sorted”.

Graffiti tags are particularly interesting as the message behind a tag on a bridge or wall is not so much a statement about the wall itself, but says “the tagger was brave (or foolish) enough to climb to this dangerous position, or risk arrest by the police to do this”. Here the tagged thing itself is a sign that represent the danger, illegality and risk associated with the place and the subject of the tag becomes the tagger herself.

There was and is far more to write about this … but as this is already becoming an essay rather than a blog, I will move on. My fascination with the string is perhaps because it is embodying relationship and so picks up on themes of externalisation allowing higher-order thinking …

A Note on the Toilet Door: Performative Labelling

While with a head full of tags and also thinking signage, I noticed that the toilet downstairs from the meeting room had a paper sign on. Presumably there had once been a metal sign, similar to (but different from) that on the women’s toilet opposite, but this had, I guess, fallen off and lost and hence the stuck-on paper sign.

[[image of sign to come]]

This made me ponder on the nature of the sign. For me it was more like a signpost, telling me where to go, or maybe a sort of warning “what lies behind this door is a men’s toilet”.

If there had been no sign, the nature of the room would have been immediately obvious, as you opened the door a line of urinals faced you. The room is a men’s toilet because that is what it is and the sign on the door is merely descriptive, telling you what is true anyway.

[ image to come]]

However, in InfoLab21 where I work, the ladies and gents toilets are identical, the only distinguishing feature is the sign on the door. I was reminded of Searle/Austin’s speech act theory and perfornative utterances, such as the minister at the wedding “I now pronounce you man and wife”. It is the speaking of the words that makes them true. In the case of the InfoLab21 toilets, the sign on the door is a performative tag/label – the toilet is a men’s toilet because the sign says so.

Ownership tags, or a dog peeing on a lamppost are similar … which I guess is an appropriately scatological point to stop.

I too am still amazed at the relative ease that ideas can be turned into reality. In a presentation “As we may print” at the 2003 Interaction Design for Children, Michael Eisenberg described how he and his co-workers at University Colorado were using laser cutters to enable children to design their own 3D designs in card or even thin plywood. More recently at the National Centre for Product Design and Development Research in Cardiff, I saw 3D metal printers. I was aware of 3D printers working in various gels and foams, but did not realise it was possible to create parts in titanium and steel, simply printed from 3D CAD designs. Chasing one of Adam’s links I found instructions to make your own 3D printer on the MIT site … however, this constructs your designs in pasta paste not metal!

One of the arguments we are making about our FireFly technology is that it will change lighting from being a matter of engineering and electronics, to a digital medium where the focus moves form hardware to software. While FireFly allows more flexible 2D and 3D arrangements than other technologies we are aware of, it is certainly not alone in making this transformation in lighting. Last week I was talking to Art Lights London and they are planning some large installations using Barco’s LED lighting arrays. Soon anything that you can point on your computer screen you will also be able to paint in light from your own Christmas tree to London Bridge.

Although it sometimes seems that technology is simply fuelling war and environmental catastrophe, it is a joy to still glimpse these occasional moments of magic.

I first saw this video when I was giving a talk at University of Peloponnese in Tripolis. Georgios¹ showed the video before I started, just because he thought it was fun. I was talking a little bit about physicality and the video brought up some really interesting issues relating to this and usability. Although it is a comic video we can unpack it and ask which of the problems that Ansgarr has as he changes technology from scroll to book would actually happen and which are more our own anachronistic view of the past.

The video starts with the technician coming in and Ansgarr. The technician asks if Ansgarr has been able to “open it”, Ansgarr says if it was that simple he wouldn’t have called the help desk. However, it turns out afterwards that he has managed to get as far as opening the book. Just like today the language used gets in the way: what does “open it” mean to a user?

It is interesting and quite reasonable that Ansgarr was able to open the book (even if he didn’t know he was doing so), because it requires little experimentation or playing with the book to open it. To know that the text starts at one end, that pages are read left to right are all clearly cultural knowledge that we do have to learn; but the fact that it can be opened is easily discoverable due to its physical nature.

However, Ansgarr has not proceeded further for fear of losing the text he has read. Just as with current technology, the Mediaeval child playing with the book might have had less problems here than the older monk. Designing to reduce fear is a major issue if we wish to engage those out of their teens. It would be nice to say this is just about perception it is hard to do real damage in most computer applications … but try saying that to the embarrassed lady who accidentally deleted a whole shared photo gallery when she meant to delete a single photo (recovering this took Fiona and I most of last night!).

The next part of the video has Ansgarr being shown how you turn very pages to see more text. This again I can see would not be obvious, and even less obvious that the text that ended at the bottom of the right-hand page continues at the top of the left-hand one.

Even worse must have been the cognitive shift from scrolls, where you could always see the context of what you were reading, to books, where you are trying to read the end of a sentence at the top of one page when the start of it is no longer visible. We take this for granted, but even for modern readers I’m sure there can be some interesting errors that occur as one reads across page-ends, just like the well known line-end effects:

Paris in
in the spring

After the page is turned, Ansgarr asks how he can see the text that he has previously read. the technician patiently explains how he can turn the page back over and Ansgarr is pleasantly surprised to see that the text is still there. Now this is exactly a point of digital anachronism. In Digital media it is by no means certain that of one goes back to where one was previously things will be the same. But the physical world is usually far easier; if you turn something over and then turn it back you expect to see what was there previously. Here is a clear place where we can ask how we can recreate some of this clarity of the physical world in the digital – how to exploit the power of dynamic content whilst preserving the intelligibility of more static invariants.

Finally the book is closed, Ansgarr goes back through the process: opens the book, skims the pages and closes it – he is satisfied, but as the technician leaves the room he finds he is stuck again and cant open the book. It turns out that it is upside down and he is trying to open it along the spine.

I am sure that left to his own devices Ansgarr would have found out that he could open the book at the left-hand side and worked from there. However, this again reveals a common problem today. The back of the book looked just like the front … and the tick box to “delete album” looked so so similar to “delete photo”.

1. one of my hosts there as part of the TIM project [back]

As I stood to get up, the boy eventually got the last letters and completed the word …

F O X Y B I N G O . C O M