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]

Mostly philosophy of the mind and materiality … the latter to help as we work on the DEPtH book on Physicality, TouchIT

• Shaun Gallagher, Dan Zahavi. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science, Routledge, 2007.
• John Lechte. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Post-Humanism, 2nd Edition, Routledge, 2007.
• Jean-Paul Sartre.  Being and Nothingnes: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, 1943.  Routledge Classics, , 2nd Edition, 2003.
• Jay Friedenberg. Artificial Psychology, Routledge , 2008.
• Max Velmans.  Understanding Consciousness, Routledge, 2009.
• Peter Carruthers. The Nature of the Mind, Routledge, 2003.

In fact, with these and the previous  set I had far too many even for a month of evenings, and below you can see the books I actually brought.

As well as a selection from the academic books also some fiction/leisure reading, some old favourites and some new ones:

• How Green was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn – a Welshman has to read this :-/
• The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger – a classic I’ve never read
• More of the Good Life – the TV series was formative for me as a child, but 40 seemed so far away
• Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson – some years since I’ve read it last, and have been loving the TV series, but I don’t think it has stayed very close to the book!
• Nella Last’s War – this is the book that was the basis for the TV drama Housewife 49 and part of the Mass Observation that collected diaries from ordinary people across Britain during the Second World War.
• Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskill – another classic that I’ve not read yet!
• As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.  Laurie Lee’s account of travelling in Spain in the run up to the Civel War.  I read it in school for O’level.
• Swallowdale, Arthur Ransome – Couldn’t find Swallow’s an Amazons, I think one of the girls might have it on their shelves!
• The Shining Company, Rosemary Sutcliff – we have loads of her histroical novels for children.  I find that good children’s writing is so much better than most adult books, which often feel they need to be incomprehensible to be good.
• The Growing Summer, Noel Streatfield – lovely story, children visiting a quirky old lady in west coast of Ireland.
• Hovel in the Hills, Elizabeth West  – another book I’ve read many times, but not for many years.  True story about a couple who buy an old house on a Welsh hillside.

In addition, but missing from the picture, is one I borrowed from my daughter, Tamara Pierce’s  The Healing in the Vine, and one I’ve borrowed from Tiziana Catarci during my visit the Languages of Art.

So, two weeks in and how far have I got …

Well, been a little busy, two journal papers, a book chapter, an interfaces article, two 3 hour lectures to the masters students here, a seminar, reading thesis chapters and helping with two grant proposals … so not got very far through the bookshelf.

In fact, to be brutally honest, so far only finished the Tamora Pierce and nearly finished Gibson (just conclusions to go):

As you can see LOTS of notes on Gibson, I will write a very long blog sometime about this, but several others in line first!

But next week several train journeys, so may get through a few more books

I have finished writing up the notes of the talks as “Touching Technology: taking the physical world seriously in digital design“.  The notes  are partly a summary of material presented in previous papers and also some new material.  Here is the abstract:

Although we live in an increasingly digital world, our bodies and minds are designed to interact with the physical. When designing purely physical artefacts we do not need to understand how their physicality makes them work – they simply have it. However, as we design hybrid physical/digital products, we must now understand what we lose or confuse by the added digitality. With two and half millennia of philosophical ponderings since Plato and Aristotle, several hundred years of modern science, and perhaps one hundred and fifty years of near modern engineering – surely we know sufficient about the physical for ordinary product design? While this may be true of the physical properties themselves, it is not the fact for the way people interact with and rely on those properties. It is only when the nature of physicality is perturbed by the unusual and, in particular the digital, that it becomes clear what is and is not central to our understanding of the world. This talk discusses some of the obvious and not so obvious properties that make physical objects different from digital ones. We see how we can model the physical aspects of devices and how these interact with digital functionality.

After finishing typing up the notes I realised I have become worryingly scholarly – 59 references and it is just notes of the talk!

Alan looking scholarly

Several classics about the nature of action in the physical world:

• James Gibson,. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New Jersey, USA, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1979
  Actually a bit embarrassing as I have written about affordance and cited Gibson many times, but never read the original!
• Martin Heidegger.  Being and Time. Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition, 2008
  Similarly how many times have I cited ‘ready to hand’!  But then again how many people have read Heidegger?
• Martin Heidegger.  Basic Writings. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008
  This is a ‘best bits’ for Heidegger!
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  Phenomenology of Perception. London, England, Routledge, 1958
  Everybody seems to cite Merleau-Ponty, but don’t know much about him … except all that French philosophy is bound to be heavy!

A couple more with a human as action system perspective, that seem to be well reviewed (and I’m guessing easier reads!):

• Shaun Gallagher. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford, UK, Clarendon Press, 2005
• Alva Noë.  Action in Perception. MIT Press, 2005

Finally three about memories: linking generally to memories for life and also designing for reflection, but looking at them more specifically in relation to Haliyana’s photologing studies.

• Paul Ricoeur.  Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago University Press; New edition,  2006
• Paul Ricoeur.  Time and Narrative, Volume 1, Chicago University Press; New edition,  1990
  More classics … and I suspect heavy reads, got another Rocoeur already, but it is still on my “to read” pile.
• Svetlana Boym.  The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2008
  Just sounded good.

Will report on them as I go

Otherwise have had our first fuel shortage when we needed petrol for the car and found there was none on the island for several days (incidentally the garage must have one of the best views in the country), had our first takeaway (fish and chip van 100 yards from the house … we are well positioned), lit our first fires (ah the smell of coal smoke reminds me of my childhood), registered at the doctors to get vaccinations ready for India (not in regimented 10 minute slots!), and of course lots of paddling in the sea … but think I might be developing my first every chilblains … well I know my own fault, but how can I resist when there is sea and foaming waves to dip my toes in.

It still feels like a holiday …  of course holiday for me tends to mean working with a nice view … so not sitting around the whole day watching the wind blow foam back in clouds from the breaking wave crests and the patterns of dark and light constantly shift with the moving clouds.  Getting lots done, for once clearing the to-do list faster than it grows (although it does still grow, some things don’t change), but for the first time for years free of that ever present feeling of heavy heavy weight on my shoulders.

… and on Monday I’ll be experiencing the flight to Glasgow myself as travelling to Dublin to give the SIGCHI Ireland inaugural lecture.  Managed to work out flights without needing a stay-over in Glasgow, but I have a feeling I will get to know the Holiday Inn Express at Glasgow airport quite well over the coming year.

Glasdon UK: Plaza® Litter Bin

Had to be drunk proof, dustman proof, and bomb proof.  Also has to be emptied without needing a key, but be difficult to open if you don’t know how (to prevent Saturday night vandalism).  To top it all had to be designed to be able to be replaced after emptying so that it self locks, and yet is made by a moulding process that means there may be up to a couple of centimetres movement from the design spec.  I am very impressed.

One of the critical things about the design was that while earlier designs used steel, his design needed to be made out of plastic.  Steel is an obvious material for a lock: strong unyielding; however the plastic lock worked because the lock and the bin around it were designed to yield, to give a little, and is so doing to absorb the shock if kicked by a drunken passer-by.

This is a sort of Judo principle of design: rather than trying to be the strongest or toughest, instead by  yielding in the right way using the strength of your opponent.

This reminded me of trees that bend in the wind and stand the toughest storms (the wind howling down the chimney maybe helps the image), whereas those that are stiffer may break.  Also old wooden pit-props that would moan and screech when they grew weak and gave slightly under the strain of rock; whereas the stronger steel replacements would stand firm and unbending until the day they catastrophically broke.

Years ago I also read about a programme to strengthen bridges as lorries got heavier.  The old arch bridges had an infill of loose rubble, so the engineers simply replaced this with concrete.  In a short time the bridges began to fall down.  When analysed more deeply  the reason become clear.  When an area of the loose infill looses strength, it gives a little, so the strain on it is relieved and the areas around take the strain instead.  However, the concrete is unyielding and instead the weakest point takes more and more strain until eventually cracks form and the bridge collapses.  Twisted ropes work on the same principle.  Although now an old book, “The New Science of Strong Materials” opened my eyes to the wonderful way many natural materials, such as bone, make use of the relative strengths, and weaknesses, of their constituents, and how this is emulated in many composite materials such as glass fibre or carbon fibre.

In contrast both software and bureaucratic procedures are more like chains – if any link breaks the whole thing fails.

Steve’s lock design shows that it is possible to use the principle of strength in weakness when using modern materials, not only in organic elements like wood, or traditional bridge design.  For software also, one of the things I often try to teach is to design for failure – to make sure things work when they go wrong.  In particular, for intelligent user interfaces the idea of appropriate intelligence – making sure that when intelligent algorithms get things wrong, the user experience does not suffer.  It is easy to want to design the cleverest algotithms, the most complex systems – to design for everything, to make it all perfect. While it is of course right to seek the best, often it is the knowledge that what we produce will not be ‘perfect’ that in fact enables us to make it better.

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 said I would send some links, so this is both a short report on the visit and also a few links to appropriation and adoption and a big long list of links to physicality!

Evening talk: Designing for adoption and designing for appropriation

I started¹ with my three use words: useful, usable and used … it doesn’t matter if your design is the most perfect ever, if it is never actually used it is useless! The talk centred around the dynamics of use:

adoption – the path between no use and use

appropriation – from plain use to the artefact becoming deeply embedded in the user’s life

In the questions I was asked how my useful-usable-used, differed from useful-usable-desirable, which is used in some ‘design’ texts. I would say that desirable is just one of the things that makes something used, in addition there are things like organisational acceptability, availability, … not to mention cost! However, the question, and subsequent talk after dinner, reminded me that I have very little knowledge of the ‘design’ literature².

The appropriation part of the talk was largely based on my HCI2007 short paper “designing for appropriation“. See also blogs about the topic by Palojono and Dan Perkel.

The adoption part was based on a draft section on designing for adoption (for next edition of HCI book) and draws heavily on my experiences in the dot.com days on 1998-2000. During that time I wrote a number of eBusiness bulletins covering various aspects of internet product development and marketing; partiicularly relevent for this talk are bulletins about lattice of value, marketplace ecology, network effects, and the websharer vision.

Some of the analysis is based on Grudin’s critical mass arguments for CSCW systems, but it was in Andy Cockburn’s thesis that I first saw this being used as a positive design tool.

During the talk I passed round some of the little Firefly units that we have developed at Lancaster that are still on display in Lancaster city centre (see blog entry).

PhD workshop on physicality

[larger image]

I really enjoyed the afternoon with the Prometei students. I asked them to bring things with them natural and man-made³, which we used as props in the discussion during the afternoon.

Everyone had two minutes to write down some differences between different kinds of things on the natural/artificial and physical/digital spectrum:

(i) natural – such as rock, wood, etc., (but not animal)

(ii) man made but simple – such as hammers or spoons

(iii) mechanical – some hand-powered such as a hand-drill, some electrically powered such as a small food mixer

(iv) digital products – such as phones, PDAs, etc.

We then spent the rest of the three hour session simply discussing what was written down – the time seemed to fly by. The flipchart notes try to reduce each element down to a single word or short phrase, but can not do justice to the rich discussion around each item.

One thing I found fascinating was that, while there was overlap between the issues raised by different people, there was also a huge difference in the kinds of issues that different people considered. The very first points on the flip chart were all about prior expectations and focused on the experiential aspects of physical and digital devices. This contrasted with my own first thoughts and that of some others in the group, which tended to be about physical properties. Interestingly several of the ‘techie’ artefacts that people brought had their own personal stories, such as Habakuk’s binocular that belonged to his grandfather. … but I don’t recall any such stories about the purely digital artefacts. Interestingly the binocular was I guess at least 40 years old but still functioned well, a 4 year old digital device is completely out of date!

Several people mentioned the relative fragility of digital devices. This is partly because of the materials used to make them (often plastic), but also because with a digital or mechanical object it is the relative configuration of parts that matter as much as the parts themselves. Hit a stone hard enough and you get two stones, but take a computer to bits and you get … just bits.

My daughter once gave me some stones for my birthday. At first they looked just like a collection of pretty grey pebbles with streaks of white through them. Then I recognised an ‘A’ on one of them, and then that they were, in fact, all the letters of my name. The stones themselves were natural, but when suitable selected and put in the right relation to one another they were a word.

In Doc Hollywood when the local garage rebuilds his precious car they give him a part “there’s always one bit left over” they say … of course the joke is that with a car if you leave one bit out it usually doesn’t run. However, with a tree if you chop one branch off it is still a tree, or take one grain from the Sahara and it is still dessert. With complexity comes fragility.

With many of the aspects that came up there were often contradictions. Although digital devices were regarded as fragile, digital information was the opposite. It is not bound by particular materials, but can be captured and replicated in the configurations of different materials at different places and times (from text on a page to electrons in circuits, or magnetised particles on a spinning disc surface).

We covered many topics (look a the enlarged flipchart image to see) some more physical (e.g. physical has size, digital virtually no size), some about interaction (e.g. affordance related ability to immediately ascertain how to manipulate a physical object vs. instruction manual for complex devices), and some communicative (continued sense of the creator, physical sign vs digital symbol).

As the evening talk was to be abut affordance, it was interesting that several people picked up on the ability to use physical items including less complex man-made ones in new ways, whereas digital devices tended to be used as designed. However, this was contrasted with the fact that in other ways a digital device (in principle) are able to be reconfigured and repurposed.

Later on, Habakuk told me about a list of aspects of physical/digital differences they they made for a TEI conference session, that they label PIBA (Physicality is Better At) vs DIBA (Digitality is Better At) [see list]. Also he and others are organising a SIG at CHI on “Designing for Intuitive Use“.

Physicality some of my own writing

I said that I would distribute a list of things I’ve done related to physicality. So including it here. Just a list I’m afraid … maybe something more annotated at another time …

• www.physicality.org – for info on DEPtH project, proceedings of Physicality 2006 & Physicality 2007 worhshops, and upcoming workshops
• First Steps in Physicality – preface to Physicality 2006 has breakdown of different physicality issues
• various keynotes and talks including: Physicality, rationality and imagination, and driving as a cyborg experience.
• my blog entries on physicality: especially physicality and middle ages tech support and matterealities and the physical embodiment of code.
• work with Masitah and others on natural interaction and fluidity: Aladdin’s lamp: understanding new from old, Knowledge of Today for the Design of Tomorrow, Visceral Interaction, Natural Inverse: Physicality, Interaction and Meaning,
• more formal approaches: Modelling Devices for Natural Interaction, Formalising Performative Interaction, and loads on status-event analysis.
• about paper documents and related: Finding Decisions Through Artefacts, Artefact-centred analysis – transect and archaeological approaches, Accidents of Infornation.
• about the physical nature of space: Welsh Mathematician walks in Cyberspace (the cartography of cyberspace), Exploiting space and location as a design framework for interactive mobile systems, Managing multiple spaces (also as book chapter), The auditability of public space – approaching security through social visibility, Paths and Patches – patterns of geognosy and gnosis.

1. Well to be strictly honest I started talking about the graffiti in the toilets … which did relate to appropriation: the toilet walls can be appropriated for graffiti precisely because they do not serve a function. I mentioned the Viking graffiti at Maes Howe in Orkney, which is remarkable similar in content to its modern equivalent. [back]
2. ‘design’ in quotes as the word is used in many ways and by this I sort of mean mainly product design. [back]
3. and we even had a short discussion about gendered language where the men told me that it wasn’t an issue in German and the women said the opposite! [back]