As I begin writing this, I’m sitting in a room that consists of an old mattress, some empty shelves and a closet stuffed with boxes – my bedroom on the eve of a move. I finished (and started) packing yesterday. This is a feat that probably makes me unrecognizable to friends who showed up on my doorstep 5 or 10 years ago to find me franticly dumping drawers into garbage bags on moving day.

Lately, I have this ritual when I move – I read Bruce Sterling’s Last Viridian Note. I’m treating it like a devotional text for the comfortably mobile. It helps me refocus my attention on my material conditions, giving me the right kind of steely-eyed attitude when it comes time to ask, “Do I really want to pack this?”

photo credit: robokow

An Extended Excerpt

My design book SHAPING THINGS, which is very Viridian without coughing up that fact in a hairball, talks a lot about material objects as frozen social relationships within space and time. This conceptual approach may sound peculiar and alien, but it can be re-phrased in a simpler way.

What is “sustainability?” Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time – time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.

In earlier, less technically advanced eras, this approach would have been far-fetched. Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbours. If you failed to surround yourself with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.

That era is dying. It’s not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.

Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

Bruce Sterling The Last Viridian Note

Sterling wrote this in late 2008, which was probably exactly when I needed to hear it (I’ve moved 3 times since then which is why I can claim the re-readings are a ritual).

Accidental Simplification

In 2007, I was engaged to be married. We shared an apartment in Toronto that was brimming with stuff, most of it in boxes. After she moved up, her parents had kindly filled a truck with everything she owned and driven it from Nova Scotia. This act of kindness turned out to be a blow from which our material living conditions never recovered.

I already had a bad habit of moving unopened boxes from apartment to apartment; with her stuff added in, it became overwhelming. Both of us worked long hours, both of us meant to get around to sorting through our stuff but progress was slow to non-existent. We lived among boxes. Boxes became furniture. Boxes shaped our pathways through the space.

When we broke up, I’d just gotten back from a 2 week trip to Montreal. I had a suitcase with clothes and a backpack with my laptop and gear. She met me at the station, we went home, she explained her decision, and I walked back out the door carrying the same luggage.

I stayed on the road for 3 months, visiting friends across the country, living out of the suitcase and backpack. I could barely remember what was in the apartment. When the lease expired, I packed it all up, gave away what I could bear, and put the rest in storage. I moved to Ottawa. I was 6 months in to my 2 week trip when I read The Last Viridian Note.

It resonated.

2 Years Later

I tell you all of this not to herald a sudden shift from cyborgs to feelings on this website but to establish some context and qualifications for this next bit. I’ve tried to varying degrees of success to follow the advice that made sense in Sterling’s sermon. I’m very glad to have gone through the exercise. I’ve learned from the experience.

I found that a surprising amount of what you own is hard to get rid of, but easy to live without. I remember very clearly in 2008 agonizing over what to toss and what to put into storage. Today, I’m paying for a locker with only the dimmest memory of what’s in there. I don’t remember at all what I gave away, though I remember very clearly being wracked with indecision about whether I should get rid of whatever it was.

This condition does not seem to have a cure. On the day of the move itself, I set aside two bags of clothes to donate. Included in this pile were some very nice jackets that I had never worn (they were hand-me-overs) and could not foresee myself ever wanting to wear. Yet as we finished for the day aside from a last stop at the drop-off box, I hesitated. What if? What if one day I wanted a jacket like that? They were perfectly good jackets. It took real mental effort to stay the course. Sterling warns that the process will be painful and he’s not wrong.

The sermon focuses very much on the individual. It’s a program for how you might clean up and de-clutter your own life. One area that’s left aside is how this attitude fits into a slightly larger context (he skips straight to the largest context – the condition of the planet). It’s reasonable to ask: how might this approach scale?

Over the past two years I’ve learned over and over how much the highly mobile rely on the stationary for support. I’ve benefitted from countless roommates and hosts who already owned the things needed to maintain a working household. Dishes, for example. If I have been able to move without filling a van, it is because I have lived with people who needed a truck. If I hadn’t had friends, I’d have needed hotels.

(One of my favourite interviews of all time has Joey Comeau and Ryan North discussing this exact thing. Read it here.)

Community Goods

When I was in university, I went to a school that was walking distance from the house that we’d lived in since I was 2. The basement was full of stuff. Quite a few of my friends were from away, and my parents’ basement became this warehouse of resources for the whole community. Need something sawed? We had that. Need extension cords and a hose? We had that too. Need 16mm film of a wedding from the 50s, along with a working projector for your play? Yup.

This basement of miscellany sustained the material needs of about 20 university students for various projects. When my parents moved out and got rid of everything (to their great relief), a resource was lost. There is a value to having things to hand. I only need one of my friends to have a bike repair stand, but boy am I glad that he does.

There is a whole category of objects like this that don’t quite fit into the Beautiful things / Emotionally important things / Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function / Everything else rubric that Sterling details. One of his criteria for “everything else” is stuff that you haven’t touched in a year. These are very likely things you can toss, but some of them only make sense to toss in a certain context.

There are items that have some critical density of need that is not one per person, but one per household, one per block, or one per neighbourhood. They might be items that you use less than once per year but that your neighbourhood would use in aggregate once every few weeks. This is a coordination problem. I can give away my extension ladder, if you promise to keep yours or vice versa, but between the two of us, we do want a ladder. (This problem is extra persistent with roommates and is how I’ve managed to go 2 years without owning dishes or living room furniture. How many toasters does a household need? Probably 1. Mine has 3.)

Designing Neighbours

In tightly knit communities, these objects can get where they’re needed through informal lending networks. But how to get them into the hands of our glocally situated young professionals who have more connections across the continent then in a 5 block radius?

We might take some inspiration from the smooth rental experience of Zipcars. The cars are just around. You don’t need to plan ahead, you just need to see if one’s available (it probably is). There aren’t forms to fill out in triplicate, heck, you don’t even need to talk to anyone. You can just go and pick it up as if it was yours and put it back when you’re done.

We might also take some inspiration from DIY bike collectives such as Toronto’s Bike Pirates. They have all the tools, even the ones that you need once per bike’s lifetime. You drop in, do some work, leave a donation, and go on your way.

Toy Libraries also show some promise. Many toys expire long before they go bad. They become boring. They are grown out of. Libraries keep them in circulation and out of people’s basements.

With the rise of cheap sensors and cheap ID tags, it’s not hard to imagine lending libraries for all kinds of specialized tools and objects. Think about how much stuff you would get rid of if you felt like you could just grab another one any old time. No need to stop at simple tools, much of what was useful about my parents’ basement was dross that was occasionally extremely useful. Imagine whole emporiums of wonder and miscellany. Think about how much you’d enjoy browsing these places, every shelf stuffed with the intriguing scraps of a project idea.

Hold on! Now we’ve just outsourced the curation and maintenance of our occasionally useful junk to some hapless individual or organization. How do you make a set up like that sustainable? Is it run for profit? Can networks of data tags make the system seamless enough that the curation duties can be distributed across the userbase, much as they are in a regular neighbourhood? These are real design problems that want useable solutions.

Sturdy, printed books present the illusion of fact. Weightless, in-the-cloud PDFs present more as fiction.

John Maeda on Twitter

I can’t stop thinking about this. It reminds me of banks. To give the impression of security and longevity, they built in stone (now, they build in expensive real estate). They say: “We are not fly by night. We will be here tomorrow. We built this temple to permanence.”

Of course we know that the paper world is rife with disposable paperbacks and other futuretrash. It turns out it’s pretty cheap to make books. But it’s even cheaper to make a PDF.

I need to think about this more. This seems important.

Related: David Carr’s characterization of 48 HR magazine as “a testament to the proposition that even the most wired cohort of journalists in the country retains a fetish for the printed product” in the article about the recent legal troubles.

Over the weekend, I finally watched Jesse Schell’s DICE 2010 presentation: “Design Outside the Box“. I’m told that it was a huge hit at SxSW. I’ve embedded it below.

It’s 30 minutes long, entertaining, and worth watching but in case you are pressed for time, here’s a summary:

• Ultra-casual games like FarmVille, Webkinz, Mafia Wars and Club Penguin took the industry by surprise and are making enormous amounts of money.
• Brian Reynolds should make a slot machine where if you win you get real money and if you lose, you get FarmVille money.
• People are starved for authenticity and links with the real world.
• Foursquare and other mobile apps seems like the next big thing.
• Sensors are becoming cheaper and cheaper and are heading towards ubiquity. (Spimes!)
• You think point programs and loyalty cards are a thing now? Wait until game designers get their hands on this stuff.
• Some examples where game designers have redesigned systems with a gaming bent (turning grades from scores into experience levels).
• An extended bit of design fiction where Schell imagines every action tracked and scored and how that might change our behaviour.

Prior art for a universal scoring system.

First thing: we already have a universal points system. It’s called money. Indeed, just about every example that Schell mentioned in his talk were systems by which we’d get points from corporations and governments that we could convert into money, discounts or tax credits, all of which are just money.

So what we’re actually talking about here is a ubiquitous micropayment system, which tracks your behaviour and rewards you accordingly. He’s talking about turning things into games by attaching a reward scheme to them.

Here’s the thing about Mafia Wars, FarmVille and all the rest. They’re objectively terrible games. They are incredibly tedious, repetitive activities gussied up with adorable (or lukewarmly bad-ass) graphics. There is little to no skill or strategy involved and the main path to advancement is to show up and click on things.

Indeed, the main profit centre for for FarmVille is giving players methods by which they can avoid playing the terrible game. You can either pay money to buy points that you can exchange for things that allow you avoid playing the terrible game, or you can look at advertisements you wouldn’t otherwise look at in order to get points that you can spend on things that allow you to avoid playing the terrible game.*

The lesson of these games is that a well-made reward scheme will get people to do all kinds of tedious fucking things. This really isn’t an exciting revelation. All those gambling addiction ads you see? Those are a consequence of the fact that a variable reward schedule will get some people to sit in front of a glowing box and press a single button over and over again until they run out of money. Casinos have this down to a science.**

Unbelievably comprehensive surveillance.

Back to the “ubiquitous” of Schell’s ubiquitous point scheme.

In computer games, the way that we can give you scores, points and achievements for the things that you do is that we know exactly what your avatar is doing at all times. Indeed the bulk of all hacking and cheating in games consists of giving the game bad information about where you are and what you are up to.

So what Schell is envisioning is a ubiquitous, perpetual, highly efficient surveillance society. Efficient to a degree that it orders of magnitude more effective than the worst fears about 1984. Is this plausible?

Well, on the one hand, people are already voluntarily giving out their locations to anyone who asks and voluntarily wear tracking devices so they can exchange bragging rights. On the other hand sometimes people are extremely reluctant to share. It’s a highly nuanced question, with very complex results.

If you can play it, you can cheat at it.

Let’s assume for a second that the right alchemy of incentives, fun, fad, and reassuring privacy policy can be found, and most of us choose to play. A lot of us are going to cheat.

We already do. We made the Game Genie a best-seller so that we could break our single player games. Every set of patch notes for every multiplayer game ever made includes changes made to close loopholes and code exploits that allow cheaters to teleport, fly, fire with perfect aim, and on and on. This is a constant battle waged over games where the gold, points, and scores have no real-world value whatsoever.

That’s just at the code level. There’s a social problem too. You can, right now, hire someone in China to play your game for you. These kinds of things are much, much harder to police and it’ll be much, much worse with real world games giving real world rewards.

Foursquare got their first taste of this when users started checking in from home. Their fix promptly ran afoul of mistaking legit check-ins for cheats. What happens when getting Foursquare points is valuable enough that it’s worth lending your phone or account login to a friend who bikes around the city collecting points for everyone in your crew? People will do it, that’s what happens. Did you hear about the US Dollar Coins exploit that gave infinite frequent flier miles? Ever considered cheating at Nike+? Here’s a guide for you.***

There are a lot of tools in the designer’s box.

The lesson here is one that economists have know for ages. Changing the incentive structure will change the way that people behave but it will rarely be in the way that you envision. People will poke at the problem and some of them will find the most efficient way to tackle it, and then they’ll post a strategy guide.

All that said, I’m pretty enthusiastic about turning the best parts of game design to the problems of the world. The promise of ubiquitous sensors that Schell mentions is that it will offer many new ways to make the invisible visible, to nudge us towards better habits and better behaviour. After all, what gets measured gets done, right?

But the emphasis in Schell’s talk on scoring systems – the bluntest, worst hammer in the game design toolbox – is the wrong approach. We already knew that we could get you to do things you didn’t want to do by offering a reward. It’s why we’re paying you to show up at work all the time.

I’m much, much more interested in using game design techniques to make the activities themselves more fun, engaging, and valuable. Instead of replicating FarmVille’s success at papering over a terrible gameplay experience with an effective reward scheme, what if we tried to replicate the successful mechanics of genuinely good games? Jonathan Blow examined this question much more eloquently in 2007.

Notes

*One might think that an easier way to avoid playing FarmVille would by to simply stop playing it. Well, I have a theory about that.

***We’ve hardly even started with the spime games and there are proto spime game hacking tools.

When I was working on the idea of the pocket-device model of augmented reality versus the lanyard model, I realized something about conference badges that didn’t really fit into the piece.

photo credit: jdlasica

Conference badges are little ancient proto-augments.

They are a way for people to carry around and display metadata about themselves. The basic bit of data is “I am allowed to be here”. Most conference passes add to that details such as who you are and who you work for. Some conference badges add in slots for customization such as press-clippings, your business card or whatever else you feel like tossing in there.

Everywhere you go, there’s the badge, broadcasting who you are and whether you are authorized. Anyone around can take a look and grab your data (such as it is). They are – as in all the lanyard augments – public, passive, and always-on.

I’d like to talk about augmented reality. Specifically, I’d like to talk about augmented reality, the things you carry in your pockets, and the things you wear around your neck.

Primer

AR basics: It’s an extension of the mobile Internet (that’s the one where people are walking around with computers disguised as phones in their pockets). The mobile Internet is what happens when devices become untethered from power, ethernet, and phone cords.

photo credit: tranchis

Let’s talk about finding a restaurant.

From the perspective of the Internet, it’s really not that interesting to know where my desktop is. It’s the same place it was yesterday and generally this fact cancels itself out. When I’m at home, a search for “Italian food” looks about the same whether I’m looking for a spot to meet a client for lunch downtown tomorrow or walking distance from my home tonight. So I have to put extra effort into telling the Internet my intentions (using other keywords and the like).

When a mobile like a Blackberry goes online, something important happens. You can’t assume that it’s in the same place that it was last time it connected. As location becomes variable it can become meaningful.

Equip a pocket computer with an Internet connection and GPS and it can start filtering “Italian restaurant” results by how close they are to the searcher. Give it a compass and a video camera and you can point your screen at things and get a video-game like overlay of the world. It can show you all kinds of stuff, such as which restaurants in your view have a 4 star rating or better. (I should note that I hate the overlayed reviews example, but it gets used a lot to illustrate the idea. More on this later.)

The notion is that there is a lot of metadata about the world which is only really relevant to people who are in a particular time and place. If the information superhighway was about bringing vast quantities of data to our fingertips in the home, augmented reality is about carrying that data back out and embedding it in the world. It’s about further blurring the line between the physical and digital. (For more, check out this overview by Will Wiles of Icon magazine.)

This is all in its very early stages. There’s a lot of excitement and money floating around, but we’re still very weak on actual useful applications running on usable devices. The eventual realization of these dreams will require a combination of hardware and software to really work. It’s not yet clear how that will look or behave.

So much for the basics.

Techno-Evolution

As the early engi-pioneers in flooding the physical world with metadata try to sort out how it’ll all work, I’ve noticed a curious process by which these devices are evolving into two distinct branches.

Let’s call branch 1: Things You Keep In Your Pocket. These are the iPhones, Blackberries, Androids and other smartphone-type things. The apps are stuff like Layar and Nearest Tube. Implicitly, I’ve been acting as if these are the only devices. Not so.

When I started writing this, it was a joke post. The title was Lanyards: Official accessory to your augmented reality and I was going to open with with this quip from Bruce Sterling:

I wish designers would stop imagining that customers really really want to carry imaginary geek-junk around their necks on lanyards. We all know that 99.995% of designers would rather be killed than wear a dorky lanyard, so why inflict that on the rest of us?

Bruce Sterling Beyond the Beyond

The joke would have been a string of photos from promotional material of people looking fabulous with near future tech toys hanging from their necks. Stuff like this:

Maptor by Jin-Sun Park and Seon-keun Park, featured on Yanko Design

So branch 2 is: Things You Wear Around Your Neck, AKA Technology on Lanyards. I’m fascinated by this branch.

(There is also a branch 3: Things You Wear On Your Head, but it’s gone dormant for some reason. It’s possible that through convergent evolution, branch 2 will come to look very much like what branch 3 might have been. Branch 4 is, I suppose, Things Embedded In Other Things. This’ll be when your car’s windshield has data displays glowing at you. Imagine a fighter jet’s HUD and you get the idea. The hold an image up to a webcam apps fall into this as well.)

Pockets

Right now, branch 1 apps are the most successful. They spread parasitically by running on top of devices that are already popular. There’s a lot of gee-whizery here. They make your boring old phone/computer/thing act like magic. It’s something you can pull out and show your friends. They are socially acceptable, because everyone you know already has a mobile phone.

They are also, for the most part, party tricks.

Take a look at the Nearest Tube demo again. Leaving aside the jittery icons, imagine yourself trying to use that thing to get around. It has arrows pointing you to the nearest stations but those arrows point as-the-crow-flies. You are in a city – in particular, you are in London. If there is one thing I can tell you about the route from your current location to the nearest tube station, it’s that it’s not a straight line.

View Larger Map

You are left holding your phone in front of you, constantly adjusting for the turns in the road. Sometimes you have to point the thing up into the sky, depending on where the icon stacking has seen fit to put your particular destination. Compare that to the (suddenly) old-fashioned Maps technique of showing you a birds-eye view of the surrounding area and a turn-by-turn suggested route.

Lanyards

The lanyard devices are quite different from the pocket ones. They are not even a little socially acceptable. No one looks good in a lanyard and if you are the kind of person who moves around much, they are get in the way all the time. They’re uncomfortable. They chafe the neck and if the thing on the end is at all heavy, they cause soreness. They evoke high school coaches with stopwatches and perky tour guides with clipboards.

They also imply a very different mode of interaction than the pocket devices.

Pocket augmented reality tends to being active, burst-use, and private. It uses tiny screens on a personal device. No one else is meant to see what it shows beyond the person holding it. You have to actively decide to take it out and make use of it, and it spends most of its time in sleep mode in your pocket.

In contrast, lanyard augmented reality is passive, always-on, and public. These are fuzzy boundaries, but take a look at a few prototypes and you’ll see what I mean.

I’ve already pointed to Maptor, a GPS device that projects a map of your immediate surroundings onto a nearby surface. Yanko’s pitch for it talks about how useful it is because no one need ever know you are lost. They gets this exactly backwards.

Lost and don’t want anyone to know? Projecting a glowing map will probably blow your cover. You are much better off pulling out your Droid and pretending you are looking at text messages while you find your way.

On the other hand, being able to unfurl a map where everyone in the group can see? That’s something missing from tiny screens. With Maptor, a group of people can gather around and point to the things they want to talk about, taking navigation back to the shared collaborative experience that it was when we had paper maps.

The Vicon Revue. Image from Reportages Photos

The Vicon Revue is a fish-eyed camera that hangs around your neck and takes photos every 30 seconds. This is perfect for reconstructing whatever happened after tequila number 5 or for self-incrimination at trial.

It’s also perfect for illustrating the passive part of lanyard augmented reality. With a pocket device, you need to pull it out of storage to start using it. You need to decide in advance that there’s something you want to capture. The Vicon reverses that. It’s always recording. Your decision is when to turn it off and, when you get home, what to edit out.

MIT’s Sixth Sense. Image from Dustin Kirk’s blog

Sixth Sense combines the camera and projector into a kind of mega-lanyard hybrid. Watch the demo here and see if you can feel the difference between that and a pocket device.

In its current state it’s clunky and socially clueless (the best moment is when it projects metadata onto the hapless acquaintance). It’s the kind of thing that only experimental engineers and conference-goers could love. But it’s also a fundamentally different attitude about the world and how the digital should bleed into it.

It’s always running, always scanning, always recording, and always waiting for instructions. Even picture-taking is changed. The act of framing the image you want isn’t taking a picture, not really. It’s telling the device which pictures to keep.

The projector is also very different from the private screen for all the reasons that Maptor is different from Maps on your phone. Other people can interact with the data. When he looks at the toilet paper and his rig tells him it’s OK, his roommate can be standing next to him and seeing the same conclusion. The digital isn’t being edited onto a video of the world, it’s being literally projected into it.

The name of the application speaks to the ambitions of the project. They want something that is so wholly integrated into your life that it feels like part of you.

It’s early days here in the augmented reality field and if the early developers keep making dorky devices, let’s cut them a little slack. After all, the Apple ][ became the Mac.