Alan’s blog

Heidegger and hammers have been part of HCI’s conceptualisation from pretty much as long as I can recall.  Although maybe I first heard the words at some sort of day workshop in the late 1980s as the hammer example as used in HCI annoyed me even then, so let’s start with hammers.

hammers

I should explain that problems with the hammer example are not my current struggles with Heidegger!  For the hammer it is just that Heidegger’s ‘ready at hand’ is often confused with ‘walk up and use’.  In  Heidegger ready-at-hand refers to the way one is focused on the nail, or wood to be joined, not the hammer itself:

“The work to be produced is the “towards which” of such things as the hammer, the plane, and the needle” (Being and Time¹, p.70/99)

To be ‘ready to hand’ like this typically requires familiarity with the equipment (another big Heidegger word!), and is very different from the way a cash machine or tourist information systems should be in some ways accessible independent of prior knowledge (or at least only generic knowledge and skills).

My especial annoyance with the hammer example stems from the fact that my father was a carpenter and I reckon it took me around 10 years to learn how to use a hammer properly²!  Even holding it properly is not obvious, look at the picture.

There is a hand sized depression in the middle.  If you have read Norman’s POET you will think, “ah yes perceptual affordance’, and grasp it like this:

But no that is not the way to hold it!  If try to use it like this you end up using the strength of your arm to knock in the nail and not the weight of the hammer.

Give it to a child, surely the ultimate test of ‘walk up and use’, and they often grasp the head like this.

In fact this is quite sensible for a child as a ‘proper’ grip would put too much strain on their wrist.  Recall  Gibson’s definition of affordance was relational³, about the ecological fit between the object and the potential actions, and the actions depends on who is doing the acting.  For a small child with weaker arms the hammer probably only affords use at all with this grip.

In fact the ‘proper’ grip is to hold it quite near the end where you can use the maximum swing of the hammer to make most use of the weight of the hammer and its angular momentum:

Anyway, I think maybe Heidegger knew this even if many who quote him don’t!

Heidegger

OK, so its alright me complaining about other people mis-using Heidegger, but I am in the middle of writing one of the chapters for TouchIT and so need to make sure I don’t get it wrong myself … and there my struggles begin.  I need to write about ready-to-hand and present-to-hand.   I thought I understood them, but always it has been from secondary sources and as I sat with Being and Time in one hand, my Oxford Companion to Philosophy in another and various other books in my teeth … I began to doubt.

First of all what I thought the distinction was:

• ready at hand — when you are using the tool and it is invisible to you, you just focus on the work to be done with it
• present at hand — when there is some sort of breakdown, the hammer head is loose or you don’t have the right tool to hand and so start to focus on the tools themsleves rather than on the job at hand

Scanning the internet this is certainly what others think, for example blog posts at 251 philosophy and Matt Webb at Berg⁴.  Koschmann, Kuutti and Hickman produced an excellent comparison of breakdown in Heidegger, Leont’ev and Dewey⁵, and from this it looks as though the above distinction maybe comes Dreyfus summary of Heidegger — but again I don’t have a copy of Dreyfus’ “Being-in-the-World“, so not certain.

Now this is an important distinction, and one that Heidegger certainly makes.  The first part is very clearly what Heidegger means by ready-to-hand:

“The peculiarity of what is proximally to hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw … that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work …” (B&T, p.69/99)

The second point Heidegger also makes at length distinguishing at least three kinds of breakdown situation.  It just seems a lot less clear whether ‘present-at-hand’ is really the right term for it.  Certainly the ‘present-at-hand’ quality of an artefact becomes foregrounded during breakdown:

“Pure presence at hand announces itself in such equipment, but only to withdraw to the readiness-in-hand with which one concerns oneself — that is to say, of the sort of thing we find when we put it back into repair.” (B&T, p.73/103)

But the preceeding sentance says

“it shows itself as an equipmental Thing which looks so and so, and which, in its readiness-to-hand as looking that way, has constantly been present-at-hand too.” (B&T, p.73/103)

That is present-at-hand is not so much in contrast to ready-at-hand, but in a sense ‘there all along’; the difference is that during breakdown the presence-at-hand becomes foregrounded. Indeed when ‘present-at-hand’ is first introduced Heidegger appears to be using it as a binary distinction between Dasein, (human) entities that exist and ponder their existence, and other entities such as a table, rock or tree (p. 42/67).  The contrast is not so much between ready-to-hand and present-to-hand, but between ready-to-hand and ‘just present-at-hand’ (p.71/101) or ‘Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more’ (p.73/103). For Heidegger to seems not so much that ‘ready-to-hand’ stands in in opposition to ‘present-to-hand’; it is just more significant.

To put this in context, traditional philosophy had focused exclusively on the more categorically defined aspects of things as they are in the world (‘existentia’/present-at-hand), whilst ignoring the primary way they are encountered by us (Dasein, real knowing existence) as ready-to-hand, invisible in their purposefulness.  Heidegger seeks to redress this.

“If we look at Things just ‘theoretically’, we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand.” (B&T p.69/98)

Heidegger wants to avoid the speculation of previous science and philosophy. Although it is not a Heidegger word, I use ’speculation’ here with all of its connotations, pondering at a distance, but without commitment, or like spectators at a sports stadium looking in at something distant and other.  In contrast, ready-to-hand suggests commitment, being actively ‘in the world’ and even when Heidegger talks about those moments when an entity ceases to be ready-to-hand and is seen as present-to-hand, he uses the term circumspection — a casting of the eye around, so that the Dasein, the person, is in the centre.

So present-at-hand is simply the mode of being of the entities that are not Dasein (aware of their own existence), but our primary mode of experience of them and thus in a sense the essence of their real existence is when they are ready-to-hand.  I note Roderick Munday’s useful “Glossary of Terms in Being and Time” highlights just this broader sense of present-at-hand.

Maybe the confusion arises because Heidegger’s concern is phenomenological and so when an artefact is ready-to-hand and its presence-to-hand ‘withdraws’, in a sense it is no longer present-to-hand as this is no longer a phenomenon; and yet he also seems to hold a foot in realism and so in another sense it is still present-to-hand.  In discussing this tension between realism and idealism in Heidegger, Stepanich⁶ distinguishes present-at-hand and ready-to-hand, from presence-to-hand and readiness-to-hand — however no-one else does this so maybe that is a little too subtle!

To end this section (almost) with Heidegger’s words, a key statement, often quoted, seems to say precisely what I have argued above, or maybe precisely the opposite:

“Yet only by reason of something present-at-hand ‘is there’ anything ready-to-hand.  Does it follow, however, granting this thesis for the nonce, that readiness-to-hand is ontologically founded upon presence-at-hand?” (B&T, p.71/101)

What sort of philosopher makes a key point through a rhetorical question?

So, for TouchIT, maybe my safest course is to follow the example of the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, which describes ready-to-hand, but circumspectly never mentions present-to-hand at all?

and anyway what’s wrong with …

On a last note there is another confusion, or maybe mistaken attitude, that seems to be common when referring to ready-to-hand.  Heidegger’s concern was in ontology, understanding the nature of being, and so he asserted the ontological primacy of the ready-to-hand, especially in light of the previous dominant concerns of philosophy.  However, in HCI, where we are interested not in the philosophical question, but the pragmatic one of utility, usability, and experience, Heidegger is often misapplied as a kind of fetishism of engagement, as if everything should be ready-to-hand all the time.

Of course for many purposes this is correct, as I type I do not want to be aware of the keys I press, not even of the pages of the book that I turn.

Yet there is also a merit in breaking this engagement, to encourage reflection and indeed the circumspection that Heidegger discusses.  Indeed Gaver et al.’s focus on ambiguity in design⁷ is often just to encourage that reflection and questioning, bringing things to the foreground that were once background.

Furthermore as HCI practitioners and academics we need to both take seriously the ready-to-hand-ness of effective design, but also (just as Heidegger is doing) actually look at the ready-to-hand-ness of things seeing them and their use not taking them for granted.  I constantly strive to find ways to become aware of the mundane, and offer students tools for estrangement to look at the world askance⁸.

“To lay bare what is  just present-at-hand and no more, cognition must first penetrate beyond what is ready-to-hand in our concern.” (B&T, p.71/101)

This ability to step out and be aware of what we are doing is precisely the quality that Schon recognises as being critical for the ‘Reflective Practioner‘.  Indeed, my practical advice on using the hammer in the footnotes below comes precisely through reflection on hammering, and breakdowns in hammering, not through the times when the hammer was ready-to-hand..

Heidegger is indeed right that our primary existence is being in the world, not abstractly viewing it from afar.  And yet, sometimes also, just as Heidegger himself did as he pondered and wrote about these issues, one of our crowning glories as human beings is precisely that we are able also in a sense to step outside ourselves and look in wonder.

1. In common with much of the literature the page references to Being and Time are all of the form p.70/99 where the first number refers to the page numbers in the original German (which I have not read!) and the second number to the page in Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation of Being and Time published by Blackwell. [back]
2. Practical hammering – a few tips: The key thing is to focus on making sure the face of the hammer is perpendicular to the nail, if there is a slight angle the nail will bend.  For thin oval wire nails, if one does bend do not knock the nail back upright, most likely it will simply bend again and just snap.  Instead, simply hit the head of the nail while still bent, but keeping the hammer face perpendicular to the nail not the hole.  So long as the nail has cut any depth of hole it will simply follow its own path and straighten of its own accord. [back]
3. James Gibson. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception [back]
4. Matt Webb’s post appears to be quoting Paul Dourish’ “Where the Action Is”, but I must have lent my copy to someone, so not sure of this is really what Paul thinks. [back]
5. Koschmann, T., Kuutti, K. & Hickman, L. (1998). The Concept of Breakdown in Heidegger, Leont’ev, and Dewey and Its Implications for Education. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 5(1), 25-41. doi:10.1207/s15327884mca0501_3 [back]
6. Lambert Stepanich. “Heidegger: Between Idealism and Realism“, The Harvard Review of Philosophy, Vol 1. Spring 1991. [back]
7. Bill Gaver, Jacob Beaver, and Steve Benford, 2003. Ambiguity as a resource for design. CHI ‘03. [back]
8. see previous posts on “mirrors and estrangement” and “the ordinary and the normal“ [back]

I got back from trip to Rome and Milan last Tuesday, this included the PPD10 workshop that Aaron, Lucia, Sri and I had organised, and the AVI 2008 conference, both in University of Rome “La Sapienza”, and a day workshop on Search Computing at Milan Polytechnic.

PPD10

The PPD10 workshop on Coupled Display Visual Interfaces¹ followed on from a previous event, PPD08 at AVI 2008 and also a workshop on “Designing And Evaluating Mobile Phone-Based Interaction With Public Displays” at CHI2008.  The linking of public and private displays is something I’ve been interested in for some years and it was exciting to see some of the kinds of scenarios discussed at Lancaster as potential futures some years ago now being implemented over a range of technologies.  Many of the key issues and problems proposed then are still to be resolved and new ones arising, but certainly it seems the technology is ‘coming of age’.  As well as much work filling in the space of interactions, there were also papers that pushed some of the existing dimensions/classifications, in particular, Rasmus Gude’s paper on “Digital Hospitality” stretched the public/private dimension by considering the appropriation of technology in the home by house guests.  The full proceedings are available at the PPD10 website.

AVI 2010

AVI is always a joy, and AVI 2010 no exception; a biennial, single-track conference with high-quality papers (20% accept rate this year), and always in lovely places in Italy with good food and good company!  I first went to AVI in 1996 when it was in Gubbio to give a keynote “Closing the Loop: modelling action, perception and information“, and have gone every time since — I always say that Stefano Levialdi is a bit like a drug pusher, the first experience for free and ever after you are hooked! The high spot this year was undoubtedly Hitomi Tsujita’s “Complete fashion coordinator”², a system for using social networking to help choose clothes to wear — partly just fun with a wonderful video, but also a very thoughtful mix of physical and digital technology.

images from Complete Fashion Coordinator

The keynotes were all great, Daniel Keim gave a really lucid state of the art in Visual Analytics (more later) and Patrick Lynch a fresh view of visual understanding based on many years experience and highlighting particularly on some of the more immediate ‘gut’ reactions we have to interfaces.  Daniel Wigdor gave an almost blow-by-blow account of work at Microsoft on developing interaction methods for next-generation touch-based user interfaces.  His paper is a great methodological exemplar for researchers combining very practical considerations, more principled design space analysis and targeted experimentation.

Looking more at the detail of Daniel’s work at Microsoft, it is interesting that he has a harder job than Apple’s interaction developers.  While Apple can design the hardware and interaction together, MS as system providers need to deal with very diverse hardware, leading to a ‘least common denominator’ approach at the level of quite basic touch interactions.  For walk-up-and use systems such as Microsoft Surface in bar tables, this means that users have a consistent experience across devices.  However, I did wonder whether this approach which is basically the presentation/lexical level of Seeheim was best, or whether it would be better to settle at some higher-level primitives more at the Seeheim dialog level, thinking particularly of the way the iPhone turns pull down menus form web pages into spinning selectors.  For devices that people own it maybe that these more device specific variants of common logical interactions allow a richer user experience.

The complete AVI 2010 proceedings (in colour or B&W) can be found at the conference website.

The very last session of AVI was a panel I chaired on “Visual Analytics: people at the heart of data” with Daniel Keim, Margit Pohl, Bob Spence and Enrico Bertini (in the order they sat at the table!).  The panel was prompted largely because the EU VisMaster Coordinated Action is producing a roadmap document looking at future challenges for visual analytics research in Europe and elsewhere.  I had been worried that it could be a bit dead at 5pm on the last day of the conference, but it was a lively discussion … and Bob served well as the enthusiastic but also slightly sceptical outsider to VisMaster!

As I write this, there is still time (just, literally weeks!) for final input into the VisMaster roadmap and if you would like a draft I’ll be happy to send you a PDF and even happier if you give some feedback

Search Computing

I was invited to go to this one-day workshop and had the joy to travel up on the train from Rome with Stu Card and his daughter Gwyneth.

The search computing workshop was organised by the SeCo project. This is a large single-site project (around 25 people for 5 years) funded as one of the EU’s ‘IDEAS Advanced Grants’ supporting ‘investigation-driven frontier research’.  Really good to see the EU funding work at the bleeding edge as so many national and European projects end up being ’safe’.

The term search computing was entirely new to me, although instantly brought several concepts to mind.  In fact the principle focus of SeCo is the bringing together of information in deep web resources including combining result rankings; in database terms a form of distributed join over heterogeneous data sources.

The work had many personal connections including work on concept classification using ODP data dating back to aQtive days as well as onCue itself and Snip!t.  It also has similarities with linked data in the semantic web word, however with crucial differences.  SeCo’s service approach uses meta-descriptions of the services to add semantics, whereas linked data in principle includes a degree of semantics in the RDF data.  Also the ‘join’ on services is on values and so uses a degree of run-time identity matching (Stu Card’s example was how to know that LA=’Los Angeles’), whereas linked data relies on URIs so (again in principle) matching has already been done during data preparation.  My feeling is that the linking of the two paradigms would be very powerful, and even for certain kinds of raw data, such as tables, external semantics seems sensible.

One of the real opportunities for both is to harness user interaction with data as an extra source of semantics.  For example, for the identity matching issue, if a user is linking two data sources and notices that ‘LA’ and ‘Los Angeles’ are not identified, this can be added as part of the interaction to serve the user’s own purposes at that time, but by so doing adding a special case that can be used for the benefit of future users.

While SeCo is predominantly focused on the search federation, the broader issue of using search as part of algorithmics is also fascinating.  Traditional algorithmics assumes that knowledge is basically in code or rules and is applied to data.  In contrast we are seeing the rise of web algorithmics where knowledge is garnered from vast volumes of data.  For example, Gianluca Demartini at the workshop mentioned that his group had used the Google suggest API to extend keywords and I’ve seen the same trick used previously³.  To some extent this is like classic techniques of information retrieval, but whereas IR is principally focused on a closed document set, here the document set is being used to establish knowledge that can be used elsewhere.  In work I’ve been involved with, both the concept classification and folksonomy mining with Alessio apply this same broad principle.

The slides from the workshop are appearing (but not all there yet!) at the workshop web page on the SeCo site.

1. yes I know this doesn’t give ‘PPD’ this stands for “public and private displays” [back]
2. Hitomi Tsujita, Koji Tsukada, Keisuke Kambara, Itiro Siio, Complete Fashion Coordinator: A support system for capturing and selecting daily clothes with social network, Proceedings of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI2010), pp.127–132. [back]
3. The Yahoo! Related Suggestions API offers a similar service. [back]

In December I’m going to be out in the far east talking at the First International Conference on User Science and Engineering (i-USEr) 2010, a new conference being launched in Malaysia. Looking forward to seeing old friends there and meeting new.  If you fancy a break from the winter rain then the call for papers is out with deadline 1st July.

Just reading the iPhone Cocoa developer docs and its description of Model-View-Controller. However, if you look at the diagram rather than the model component directly notifying the view of changes as in classic MVC, in Cocoa the controller acts as mediator, more like the Dialogue component in the Seeheim architecture¹ or the Control component in PAC.

The docs describing the Cocoa MVC design pattern in more detail in fact do a detailed comparison with the Smalltalk MVC, but do not refer to Seeheim or PAC, I guess because they are less well known now-a-days.  Only a few weeks ago when discussing architecture with my students, I described Seeheim as being more a conceptual architecture and not used in actual implementations now.  I will have to update my lectures – Seeheim lives!

1. Shocked to find no real web documentation for Seeheim, not even on Wikipedia; looks like CS memory is short.  However, it is described in chapter 8 of the HCI book and in the chapter 8 slides [back]

I’m wondering why people break things when they create new versions.

Firefox used to open a discreet little window when you downloaded papers.  Now-a-days it opens a full screen window completely hiding the browser.

A minor issue, but makes me wonder about both new versions and also defaults and personalisation in general.

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You would think crash reporting would be made as seamless and helpful as possible, after all your product has just failed in some way and you wish (a) to mollify the user; and (b) to solicit their assistance in obtaining a full report.

You would think …

In the following I will reflect on what goes wrong in Adobe’s crash reporting and some  lessons we can learn from it.

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Years ago I wrote a short CHI paper with Roberta Mancini and Stefano Levialdi “communication, action and history” all about the differences between language and action, but for the second time in a few weeks I am writing about the links. But of course there are both similarities and differences.

In my recent post about “language and action: sequential associative parsing“, I compared the role of semantics in the parsing of language with the similar role semantics plays in linking disparate events in our interpretation of the world and most significantly the actions of others. The two differ however in that language is deliberative, intentionally communicative, and hence has a structure, a rule-iness resulting from conventions; it is chosen to make it easier for the recipient to interpret. In contrast, the events of the world have structure inherent in their physical nature, but do not structure themselves in order that we may interpret them, their rule-iness is inherent not intentional. However, the actions of other people and animals often fall between the two.

In this post I will focus in on individual actions of creatures in the world and the way that observing others tells us about their current activities and even their intended actions, and thus how these observations becomes a resource for planning our own actions. However, our own actions are also the subject of observation and hence available to others. We may deliberately hide or obfuscate our intentions and actions if we do not wish others to ‘read’ what we are doing; however, we may also exaggerate them, making them more obvious when we are collaborating. That is, we shape our actions in the light of their potential observation by others so that they become an explicit communication to them.

This exaggeration is evident in computer environments and the physical world, and may even be the roots of iconic gesture and hence language itself.

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In explaining how to make sentences more readable (I know I am one to talk!), I frequently explain to students that language understanding is a combination of a schema-based syntactic structure with more sequential associative reading.  Only recently I realised this was also the way we had been addressing the issue of task sequence inference in the TIM project. and is related also to the way we interpret action in the real world.

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Just scanning a few Google Tech Talks on YouTube.  I don’t visit it often, but followed a link from Rob Style’s twitter.  I find the video’s a bit slow, so tend to flick through with the sound off, really wishing they had fast forward buttons like a DVD as quite hard to pull the little slider back and forth.

One talk was by Stuart Hameroff on A New Marriage of Brain and Computer.  He is the guy that works with Penrose on the possibility that quantum effects in microtubules may be the source of consciousness.  I notice that he used calculations for computational capacity based on traditional neuron-based models that are very similar to my own calculations some years ago in “the brain and the web” when I worked out that the memory and computational capacity of a single human brain is very similar to those of the entire web. Hameroff then went on to say that there are an order of magnitude more microtubules (sub-cellular structures, with many per neuron), so the traditional calculations do not hold!

Microtubules are fascinating things, they are like little mechano sets inside each cell.  It is these microtubules that during cell division stretch out straight the chromosomes, which are normally tangled up the nucleus.  Even stranger those fluid  movements of amoeba gradually pushing out pseudopodia, are actually made by mechanical structures composed of microtubules, only looking so organic because of the cell membrane – rather like a robot covered in latex.

The main reason for going to the text talks was one by Steve Souders “Life’s Too Short – Write Fast Code” that has lots of tips for on speeding up web pages including allowing Javascript files to download in parallel.  I was particularly impressed by the quantification of costs of delays on web pages down to 100ms!

This is great.  Partly because of my long interest in time and delays in HCI. Partly because I want my own web scripts to be faster and I’ve already downloaded the Yahoo! YSlow plugin for FireFox that helps diagnose causes of slow pages.  And partly  because I get so frustrated waiting for things to happen, both on the web and on the desktop … and why oh why does it take a good minute to get a WiFi connection ….  and why doesn’t YouTube introduce better controls for skimming videos.

… and finally, because I’d already spent too much time skimming the tech talks, I looked at one last talk: David Levy, “No Time To Think” … how we are all so rushed that we have no time to really think about problems, not to mention life¹.  At least that’s what I think it said, because I skimmed it rather fast.

1. see also my own discussion of Slow Time [back]

I am reading Michel de Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life“.  The first chapter begins:

The erosion and denigration of the singular or the extraordinary was announced by The Man Without Qualities¹: “…a heroism but enormous and collective, in the model of ants” And indeed the advent of the anthill society began with the masses, … The tide rose. Next it reached the managers … and finally it invaded the liberal professions that thought themselves protected against it, including even men of letters and artists.”

Now I have always hated the word ‘normal’, although loved the ‘ordinary’.  This sounds contradictory as they mean almost the same, but the words carry such different connotations. If you are not normal you are ’subnormal’ or ‘abnormal’, either lacking in something or perverted.  To be normal is to be normalised, to be part of the crowd, to obey the norms, but to be distinctive or different is wrong.  Normal is fundamentally fascist.

In contrast the ordinary does not carry the same value judgement.  To be different from ordinary is to be extra-ordinary², not sub-ordinary or ab-ordinary.  Ordinariness does not condemn otherness.

Certeau is studying the everyday.  The quote is ultimately about the apparently relentless rise of the normal over the ordinary, whereas Certeau revels in  the small ways ordinary people subvert norms and create places within the interstices of the normal.

The more I study the ordinary, the mundane, the quotidian, the more I discover how extraordinary is the everyday³. Both the ethnographer and the comedian are expert at making strange, taking up the things that are taken for granted and holding them for us to see, as if for the first time. Walk down an anodyne (normalised) shopping street, and then look up from the facsimile store fronts and suddenly cloned city centres become architecturally unique.  Then look through the crowd and amongst the myriad incidents and lives around, see one at a time, each different.

Sometimes it seems as if the world conspires to remove this individuality. The InfoLab21 building that houses the Computing Dept. at Lancaster was sort listed for a people-centric design award of ‘best corporate workspace‘.  Before the judging we had to remove any notices from doors or any other sign that the building was occupied, nothing individual, nothing ordinary, sanitised, normalised.

However, all is not lost.  I was really pleased the other day to see a paper  “Making Place for Clutter and Other Ideas of Home”⁴. Laural, Alex and Richard are looking at the way people manage the clutter in their homes: keys in bowls to keep them safe, or bowls on a worktop ready to be used.  They are looking at the real lives of ordinary people, not the normalised homes of design magazines, where no half-drunk coffee cup graces the coffee table, nor the high-tech smart homes where misplaced papers will confuse the sensors.

Like Fariza’s work on designing for one person⁵, “Making a Place for Clutter” is focused on single case studies not broad surveys.  It is not that the data one gets from broader surveys and statistics is not important (I am a mathematician and a statistician!), but read without care the numbers can obscure the individual and devalue the unique.  I heard once that Stalin said, “a million dead in Siberia is a statistic, but one old woman killed crossing the road is a national disaster”. The problem is that he could not see that each of the million was one person too. “Aren’t two sparrows sold for only a penny? But your Father knows when any one of them falls to the ground.”⁶.

We are ordinary and we are special.

1. The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil, 1930-42, originally: Der Mann ohne Eigenschafte. Picador Edition 1997, Trans.  Sophie Wilkins and  Burton Pike: Amazon | Wikipedia [back]
2. Sometimes ‘extraordinary’ may be ‘better than’, but more often simply ‘different from’, literally the Latin ‘extra’ = ‘outside of’ [back]
3. as in my post about the dinosaur joke! [back]
4. Swan, L., Taylor, A. S., and Harper, R. 2008. Making place for clutter and other ideas of home. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 15, 2 (Jul. 2008), 1-24. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1375761.1375764 [back]
5. Described in Fariza’s thesis: Single Person Study: Methodological Issues and in the notes of my SIGCHI Ireland Inaugural Lecture Human-Computer Interaction in the early 21st century: a stable discipline, a nascent science, and the growth of the long tail. [back]
6. Matthew 10:29 [back]