About a decade ago, I was in the midst of completing my degree in information science at the University of Michigan.  Wanting to avoid just taking a bunch of vanilla courses, such as computer programming, data modeling, and cognitive psychology, (which all are valuable and important courses to take), I sought out courses in other schools and departments to broaden my horizons.  One such course, in the School of Art & Architecture, was a physical computing course called “Interfacing.”

In the Interfacing course, an art student would pair up with a student from the School of Electrical Engineering to collaborate in building a series of electronic interactive art pieces.  Since I had registered for the course via the School of Art, I was considered the “artist” and was paired up with an engineering student.  Together, we developed our project idea, an analog radio that would tune itself based on proximity sensors, allowing people passing by to discover that their movement was affecting the radio frequency.  Then, we created a circuit board from scratch, soldered on all the necessary electronics, and programmed a 10K chip with the logic needed to have input from the proximity sensor to drive a motor attached to the tuning wheel of the radio.

While we only had mixed success with our nifty little human proximity tuner, the most important lesson was that of working across and truly integrating two disciplines, in this case art and engineering, and discovering that what the other does is not as mysterious and weird as one might think.  I didn’t know it at the time, but this was my first foray into Pairing, a concept currently receiving widespread and well-deserved attention thanks to the Agile movement. Pairing is most well-know in the form of Pair Programming, in which two developers share one keyboard, one “driving” (i.e. typing), the other “navigating” (i.e. telling the other programmer what to type.)  To an outsider, this may seem a strange ritual indeed, but it is in fact a powerful way of generating a highly focused whole-brain work session, in which one person is continually debugging the work of the other. (I.e. as the driver types, they are also thinking about and evaluating everything the navigator tells them to type, able to continually make course-corrections.)

In our case, we were pairing across disciplines, which can be just as powerful.  It becomes an act of debugging or evaluating the work of the other across dimensions.  While the engineer may be deep in their C programming mode, I am thinking about how the resulting code will impact the experience of people walking in front of the tuner.  While the engineer is gaining a deeper awareness of the impact of their coding choices on the people interacting with the machine, I as the “artist” am gaining a deeper appreciation for the complexities of software development (for example, when programming a chip, you can’t call a library function such as “abs()” to get an absolute value, you have to actually write an algorithm for that from scratch.)

Unfortunately, this type of cross-disciplinary pairing is, as far as I know, incredibly rare in academia.  Instead, artists or designers are often housed separately and away from engineers and computer scientists, rarely if ever having any contact with one another. The same seems to hold true for those in the interaction and graphic design fields. Until my first day on my first job out of school as an Information Architect at a small web agency, I had never worked with a graphic designer. I have to wonder how many of those students currently studying interaction design are spending time working side-by-side with software developers.  Based on my informal survey, the amount of time they spend together in academia is approximately zilch.

It is no wonder, then, that so many people in the interaction design community I have spoken with seem to think of developers as the Other, as people who simply are different from Us, who simply do not understand the subtleties and nuances of designing a user experience, who do not think the same way that We do. It is no wonder that so many people in the interaction design community suffer from what I call The Genius Problem, in which they see themselves as the creators of ideas, while developers are mere builders, construction workers who transform these ideas into reality.  It is no wonder that so many people in the interaction design community greet the idea of Agile software development with a high degree of suspicion.  It is no wonder because that is a mindset that academic institutions (unwittingly) have indoctrinated them into during the formative years of their practice.

As long as academic institutions in general, and interaction design programs specifically, do not begin to truly integrate their students with those in the computer science departments, this problem will persist.  Agile should not be something that is only taught in computer science departments, and only discovered by interaction designers on their first day at work.  For Agile to be effective, these students need come into these roles with an understanding of what they do as not being something separate from what software developers do.  And for that to happen, computer programming students should be spending time with graphic design students, graphic design students should be spending time with interaction design students, interaction design students should be spending time with computer science students, and so forth. Until that happens, the integration of Agile with other disciplines will continue to be a perpetual struggle.

About a year ago, we had a deluge of rain that flooded the New York City subway system and basically shut several lines down completely for a day or more. The already crumbling NYC Transit’s infrastructure was simply unable to handle this amount of sudden rainfall. Soon after, the authority promised to make significant improvements, to be able to better handle an event like this in the future. One of these improvements was to better inform travelers of any possible issues with the subway service, so that they could plan accordingly. A week or so ago, with great fanfare, the MTA announced a new alert system that people could subscribe to, which would provide up-to-the-minute alerts about issues with the subway service.

So far so good.

I signed up for the new alert system and quickly discovered that the solution, aside from being fairly archaic in terms of how people subscribe and make their selections, simply is not the right fit for the problem. The reason for this is the somewhat tragic reality of New York’s subway system: it is effectively in a continual state of emergency. In other words, there are *always* a number of ongoing problems, such as a signal problem, a sick passenger, and on and on. Here is a sampling of alerts I received recently:

Smoke condition at 42nd St, Euclid C trains running exp from 59th St to Canal St and WTC E trains running exp from 42nd St to Canal St.

Police investigation at 86th St; Crown Heights 4 and Brooklyn Bridge 6 trains running express from 125th St to 42nd St.

Sick customer at Roosevelt Avenue, Jamaica bound E and 179th St bound F running local Roosevelt to Continental.

Now, imagine getting alerts like this in your inbox on a continual basis. Even if it may just be once a day (though these alerts are popping into my inbox throughout the day), you will eventually start to just ignore them or get sick of them and unsubscribe from the alerts. The problem here is that I am receiving a continual stream of information that most of the time is irrelevant to me, and would only be relevant to me at the particular point in time when I plan to ride the subway. For that reason, I think a pull rather than the current push model would make more sense. In other words, whenever I plan to ride the subway, I’d have a bookmarked link or whatever that would take me a to a page summarizing what was happening at that moment. Or, if I wanted to get even fancier, I’d have something like an iPhone app (or a Crackberry app, though I don’t know if they have GPS), which would automatically customize the info displayed based on my current location.

I am hoping that the initial version of the system is only just that, an initial version, and that there are plans to provide information in a way that is more timely and relevant.

Olga just sent me a link to her new project UX Social, in which she’s interviewing some guy on how IA could/should be applied to government policies and the like. Oh wait, that’s me!

(watch the 2nd part at Olga’s site)

In this interview, Olga gave me an opportunity to vent a little bit about the bane of my existence, and probably that of a few million other fellow New Yorkers, the MTA. Officially, the acronym stands for the Metro Transit Authority, though I think a more accurate meaning of is Mysterious Train Activity.

Anyhoo, one of the many many many stupid things that our beloved MTA did was to install ‘Emergency Exits’ at all of the several hundred subway stations. Problem is, these exits used to be normal exits, except they were bigger and wider than subway turnstyle exits, so that people with bikes and baby carriages could use them. The thing was, though, you had to press a tiny button next to the door and then wait for a subway attendant to buzz you through. And if there was no nearby attendant booth, well then there was no large exit door, so you’d have to trek to the opposite end of the station to be able to exit with your bike or whatever.

To address this problem, the MTA came up with a brilliant, brilliant!, solution. Y’know those doors with the big horizontal bar on the insider of the door that you push to exit? Well, they replaced all the old doors and installed additional doors at unattended areas with that *huuuge* button just begging to be pushed, which allows people to exit even if there is no attendant around. Oh, one small detail, there is a very noisy alarm that goes off when you push that huge irresistible button. But what do you care, you’re long gone up the stair and out of the subway, while the people on the platform have to contend with a sharp whining sound that seems like it’s never going to stop. Well, there’s more to the story, but check out Olga’s page for the rest of it.

Thanks Olga!

Oh, and she’s got lots of other great interviews with people a lot smarter than me at UX Social.

With great fanfare, New York City Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff (who will almost certainly never use this toilet himself) today announced the installation of new public toilets throughout the city (toilets he will almost certainly not be using himself.)  The idea of public restrooms in the city is of course highly welcomed, though it’s a bit embarrassing that this is being announced in 2008 and not, say, 1908.  But no matter, when reading the description of the new toilets, there are just so many IMO terrible design choices that were made that I have to wonder if any kind of prototyping/usability testing was completed.  I just can’t imagine these toilets being a success and these are some reasons why:

1 – They look like prison toilets

There is a very strong association between a stainless steel toilet attached to the wall with no seat and what you might find in a prison cell. In fact, when I first saw a picture of the toilet, I thought that it was a picture of exactly that. The idea of a prison toilet, of course, has strongly negative connotations, somehow making the statement that “citizens of New York are so uncivilized and prone to destruction of property that we have to take the same approach to designing a toilet for them as we would for prison inmates.” Sad indeed.

2 – I would never sit on a public steel toilet without a seat (even if it supposedly had been cleaned)

The reason for this is not only about logic, but also that I would just find it weird. And wouldn’t the toilet also get very hot in the summertime and very cold in the wintertime? Why couldn’t they at least have a plastic top on the toilet that can’t be lifted?

3 – The door to the toilet remains open for 20 to 30 seconds after entering

Like the NYT article says, this will

possibly be the longest and most awkward 20 to 30 seconds of a person’s day. The door slips open like an elevator, but then it stays open, to accommodate those who need extra time getting in. Meanwhile, men and women in suits walk past. It is very difficult to look inconspicuous in a bathroom on a sidewalk in New York with the door open. There is just nothing to do but stand there. And the delay will not please those who are in distress.

So here I am, really needing to go. With most every other toilet I’ve ever encountered, I can close the door behind me as soon as I enter. But here I am supposed to just stand there looking stupid with people walking by? The fact that certain disabled individuals may need more time is all good and well, but they should have the option of preventing the door from closing immediately rather than keep the door open for an extended period for everyone.  This is a case of broad-sword design, in which all users of a product are made to suffer to accommodate an edge case.

4 – The door to the toilet opens automatically after 15 minutes

Interestingly, this second ‘feature’ is in complete contradiction to the door being kept open on entry. What if I am a disabled person who needs more time? I would be publicly humiliated. And, frankly, even if I technically would be able to finish my business in that amount of time, I just don’t like the idea of this time limit hanging over me. And this isn’t just about disabled people. What about older people who need more time? Or parents with their kids? Very very bad, IMO.

5 – The toilets are only open from 8am to 8pm

If these toilets supposedly are completely automated, why in the world can they not be available 24/7? After all, the time when I think a lot of people would want to use something like this is when everything else is closed, i.e. not between 8am and 8pm.

6 – The toilet will use 14 gallons of water per use

This is according the NYT City Room Blog. Keeping in mind that the EPA’s recommendation of water use for a single flush is around 1.5 gallons, this is absolutely egregious. To be clear, the 14 gallons are used to hose down the toilet between each person who has used it. This kind of water waste is IMO simply environmentally unethical, and reason enough for me to avoid it.

I was listening to the BBC this morning and heard a piece about the Eyes on Darfur site, which went live just hours ago, at 8:30am EST. The reporter described the site as an effort to draw attention to the atrocities occurring in the region by posting satellite imagery of villages that are at imminent risk of being attacked. They interviewed a representative from Amnesty International, which is behind the creation of the site, who described the satellite imagery as being able to depict in great detail what is happening on the ground, and provide “unimpeachable evidence” of war crimes and “enabling action by private citizens, policy makers and international courts.”

Upon visiting the site, my first reaction was to the soft colors and rounded edges and generally very slick design – it was somehow jarring and in stark contrast to the site content. But no matter, I wanted to explore the satellite imagery and clicked on the ‘Satellite Evidence‘ link – again, there was just something about the smooth Flash animations and slick graphics that I guess I’ve been so indoctrinated to associate with games and, in the Web 2.0 world, a good user experience, that I really had to force myself to put all that aside and realize the horrible tragedy that the makers of this site have worked so hard depict. But sadly, heartwrenchingly, I found the satellite imagery to be terribly disappointing – if I had seen these images without any supporting descriptions, I’m not sure if I’d had much of an idea of what I was looking at. Is there some feature, some button, that I am not clicking on? I really hope so – the idea of bringing this terrible tragedy to the world’s attention by allowing them to see it up close is a fantastic one – few things are more likely to drive people to take action than seeing something up close – I can only hope that the detailed images described in the BBC segment are there, and that I just didn’t find them.

I subscribe to a great newsletter from SitePoint about all things web design, and they usually have lots and lots of great digital tidbits to share, but I think this time they might be slightly off the mark with the following heading for the article: “Spice up your Design Projects and Get Noticed.” It’s the title for an article about a service called SitePal. I think it took me all of a nanosecond or two after arriving at the site to have Boo.com flashbacks. The first thing you’re greeted by when the page loads is a scary-looking animated character.

In a comically bad synthetic voice, she proclaims “Put a character like me to work in minutes. I’ll spice up your site.” Actually, if anything I think she might scare people away from your site. I know that if I saw one of those things on a commercial site, I’d be gone pretty fast.

While Bush & Co. are busy reducing the privacy of U.S. citizens, my fellow Swedes are fighting back on their home front. The Swedish Piratpartiet is releasing a new product called relakks, which essentially is a commercial darknet, (supposedly) allowing users to exist and interact completely anonymously while online. In a world where spyware and other online snooping is becoming increasingly pervasive and sophisticated, a commercial darknet seems like an inevitable response. And it’s great to see the traditionally stoic Swedes getting pissed off at their own government’s steps at prying on their citizen’s activities. Whether or not it’s a good idea for users to be able to function completely anonymously online is a sticky question (yes, I have a right to and want to retain my privacy, but on the other hand, won’t darknets allow terrorists to communicate freely online, and on the third hand, I actually don’t mind some information about me being made known, since that allows for sometimes useful personalization.) What’s more interesting here is that a political party is releasing a (sociologically) cutting edge product in support of their agenda.

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Back in the 70s, when personal computing entered the mainstream, they came about as a means of providing individuals a tiny piece of the computing power available to governments, corporations, and universities in the form of mainframes. But in contrast to the mainframe/terminal paradigm, in which the network is an inherent aspect of the model, personal computers were mostly islands. Rather than being delivered via a network, virtually all data input came via a floppy disk or the like. Networking for personal computers would not become a mainstream reality until thousands of miles of fiber optic cable later. While mainframes efficiently stored and managed all data and provided all processing power centrally on the mainframe mother ship, with dummy terminals limited to input/output, the personal computer ended up being like little pioneers, required to be completely self-sufficient in terms of processing power, data storage, and software. Even after the World Wide Web entered the mainstream in the mid 90s, it would be quite some time until broadband networks would become widely accessible and allow for offloading some of that burden to remote servers, so the little pioneers settled and became beefy workstations with massive storage capabilities and mainstream processor speeds eventually surpassing that of supercomputers of old. This evolutionary path has continued in a steady progression, to the point where personal computers are starting to look like their own little mainframes, at least in terms of the extent to which they need to be maintained—owning a personal computer today means being a mini-administrator, dealing with software updates, security issues, networking, etc. But, of course, personal computers are not mainframes. More importantly, they have long since ceased being islands. As networking becomes an increasingly central aspect of personal computing, the personal computing paradigm as we’ve now known it for the last quarter century is making less and less sense. It’s making less and less sense for files and applications to reside on a local machine, considering that more and more people work on multiple computers, and more and more people have access to broadband connectivity, which negates so many of the original reasons why personal computers came about in the first place. In my view, what instead would make sense would be for a mainstreaming of the mainframe paradigm. In some ways, that process already is underway, in the guise of the Web 2.0. web-as-platform model. Building on that, I would like to not only store these blog entries online, but all my files (some of which of course I would choose to keep private.) In addition, instead of sitting here typing this in Word, a desktop application (yup, even though it will eventually end up online, doing a lot of typing in a text area isn’t exactly an optimal user experience, so I always type everything first in Word), I would want to be able to have a web-based version of Office, in which it was provided as a service, and I never again had to worry about installing it or keeping it updated or having to attach Word docs to emails whenever I wanted to send it to someone. After having typed this, rather than clicking on a save button (which would be gone, since it would always be automatically saved), I would just publish it, without the need for any FTPing or anything like that, since it would already be online. Then, instead of sending someone an attachment, I’d just send them a link. And let’s say I wanted to collaborate with someone on writing a document – well, I would just need to give them access to it, and suddenly we’ve got a collaborative workspace, or I could open it up even more and turn the document into a Wiki. I could go on, and talk about all the advantages of moving personal files to an online space and turning desktop applications into either free online apps or subscription-based online apps (e.g. no more dealing with backups of your files, since that would be part of the subscription service), but the funny thing is that there really is nothing about these ideas that is infeasible. It’s more a question of whether or not companies that have a strong interest in retaining the status quo of personal computing, such as, oh I don’t know, Microsoft? (and Apple too), would have the boldness and vision to make their products available as an online service. The good news is that there are companies, such as, oh I don’t know, Google? (and Yahoo! too), that in many ways already are either realizing or creating the momentum for just such a shift.

I just finished reading Peter Morville’s new book Ambient Findability. The book is exquisitely written, with innumerable tidbits about information retrieval curiosities, such as the obscure, but as Peter nicely points out, very significant Mooers Law (not to be confused with Moore’s Law, the one about microprocessors doubling in speed every few years), which describes the relationship between the use of an info retrieval system in relationship to the pain a user must endure to use it. Three chapters into the book, Morville makes a brilliant connection between Moor’s and Mooer’s laws:

Fast, cheap processors powered a personal computer revolution and enabled the information explosion we call the Internet. Five exabytes of information. Half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress. That’s how much information we create in a year, 92% of it stored in magnetic media. It’s time we shifted our focus from creating a wealth of information to addressing the ensuing poverty of attention.

Hear! Hear! The siren song of the war against information overload! Or is it? Upon reading this, I was expecting to read about how we are pumping unfettered volumes of content (such as this gratuitous blog entry) down the throat of the poor Internet, drowning it with endless streams of folksonomized info ooze. And, yes, Peter does deliver on that front, but not in the way I expected. Rather than pointing a finger at the easy target of Bad Technology, he chooses to explore that nebulous space between human quirkiness and technological stodginess, and the unending friction between the two.

Yes, the amount of information being amassed is mind-bending, and yes trying to retain any notion of findability within that seemingly horizon-less sea of increasingly ambient (as in anywhere anytime access) information seems insurmountable (except for Google, of course, but back to planet Earth…). Instead of getting caught in that ever-tempting desire of the infonaut to provide Solutions to Problems, to say “read this book and you too can be an Organizer of Content,” Morville takes us on a journey through his ambivalent musings (well-researched musing at that) of this intertwinglingly complexificated place which is all at once our own technological creation and continuing source of mystery, beauty, frustration and fear, a world of McGoogle information dysliteracy and what Morville calls “Graffiti Theory” (Google Hawkins and neocortex for more on that), information that flows through us changes our minds, physically, Peter claims.

In some ways, his book is no more than a Faberge Egg of exquisite gems about the latest and greatest in technological tres cool (reminding me somewhat unfortunately of Nicholas Negroponte’s crowd-pleasing doozy, “Being Digital”), but toward the end, it seems that was just beef for the stew, and the work seems to take on a more somber tone, intertwining politics, economics (er, Levitt Freakonomics, actually) to mold what in my view is less a book that belongs in the technology section (where you will inevitably find it, after all it’s an O’Reilly with obscure animal on the cover and all), but might be better placed in the sociology section, or maybe anthropology section, or possibly the ethnography section, no, maybe the…

I remember a few years ago reading about some official from the FCC stating that, in the future, people will no longer have what we think of as home phones, but will all have their personal phones/numbers. I also remember thinking that this sounded utterly ridiculous and unthinkable. And yet, of course, then came mobile phones, and today I find myself on a monthly basis rationalizing having both a land line and a cell phone. The idea of not having a land line would have seemed unthinkable to me only a few years ago. But I can imagine, only a few short years from now, the idea of a land line seeming a bit quaint.

A few years before that (as in ca 1994), the idea of The Web was still pretty much alien to me. I remember going into Border’s books on Liberty and State in Ann Arbor, and picking up books on the Internet and the World Wide Web, just to figure out what the difference was between the two. Looking back, it seems so pedantic. This was the age of Mosaic and Gopher and the web as the techno-utopian Savior. And then came Amazon and eBay and Yahoo! (considering that they still are three of the biggest sites on web, you have to wonder how much really has changed since then), and the web lost some its innocence (ok, the innocence thing was pretty much out the door as soon as UseNet got overrun with porn, and I am not sure if UseNet ever was not overrun with porn.)

These were the days when you’d take surveys asking how much time you spend online: “Do you spend more than an hour per week online?”  Today, or not too far from today, that is almost like asking “How much time in a day do you spend using electricity?” Being online was an active decision. You logged onto the Internet, tried not to use up all your precious minutes, and then got off the Internet.

Today, I hit the space bar on my laptop and if there is a wireless network within range, I’m connected. And as wireless networks become cheaper and more pervasive (as in the death of  the “hotspot”), I think the whole idea of being online will vanish. Instead, turning on your computer (or your PDA or whatever) is synonymous with being online.  Everything will be turned on its head and being off-line will be the extraordinary state, just like a power outage is an extraordinary event.

Aside from the sociological responses to this, which we see already sprouting up here and there today, such as the “No Cell Phones” sign at Brooklyn Social, one of my favorite local hangouts, equivalent to a No Smoking section, except what you’re forbidding isn’t so much unhealthy biologically as it might be psychologically.  As technology and connectivity become increasingly pervasive, and increasingly intimate, as in the phone going from being something you used at the post office (yes, making a call was once akin to going out for groceries) to something you had in the hallway of your home, to something in your kitchen, to something on your bedside table that could wake you at any hour, to this little thing we now carry around that vibrates in our pants.

It will likely end up being something implanted in your body. Yup, that might sound scary, but having a communication device implant may not be something out of a paranoid Philip K. Dick story but a reality before too long, and there is the inevitability of a reaction to this, akin to the Slow Foods movement which attracts urban types seeking to counter the fast pace of city life, such as what I would call the Disconnected Movement, where you would go offline, maybe pay money to be able to disconnect The Leash that is what always-on wireless connectivity effectively becomes.

Sort of ironic. I wonder if there will be “No Internet” cafes, in which connectivity is blocked out, or “Disconnected Cruises” where there will be no email or cell phones. It might seem far-fetched, though I can imagine myself going on such a cruise a few years from now.