Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

It’s one of those perfect storm social weekends for me. I’m hanging out with an out-of-town friend tomorrow afternoon, and then I’m invited to three parties tomorrow evening, with three completely different social groups. And it got me thinking about my social network.

I don’t tend to consider myself a very social person. I’m not hanging out with people every night. I tend to hate parties where I don’t know people, so meeting new people is tough. And yet I’ve got links to all these different social groups. So much so that several friends of mine have been saying “Wait, before you leave the Bay Area, you need to introduce me to so-and-so that I’ve heard so much about!”

Somehow over the past ten years, I’ve become a social nexus. It’s a bizarre concept for somebody who’s as introverted as I am. And yet there it is. I’ve got my TEP crowd, a larger MIT alum crowd, a group of friends through my friends Brad and Spider (those are the three groups this weekend), not to mention my ultimate frisbee friends, my coworkers (current and former), the chorus folks, a few of the BrainJammers etc. Just thinking about trying to have farewell events with all of these different groups makes my head spin.

Another interesting aspect is that I don’t really have strong ties to any of these groups other than the TEPs. I’m on the periphery of all of them, but yet well-known enough within each that I’m generally welcome to show up to events. My network is all about the Granovetter weak ties. And I suppose that makes sense; if I were heavily invested in any particular social group, I wouldn’t have time to flit among the rest of them. My lack of commitment enables this social nexus-hood.

Via Robert Cringely, I came across a page providing a basic overview of social network analysis a couple days ago. I know basically nothing about the field, but I like some of the terminology. In this case, I would classify myself as a boundary spanner, which has actually been a boon in my professional life. When I was a programmer at Signature, the software was where everything came together - I had to understand the hardware well enough to write an interface for it, I had to understand the math and physics well enough to write the analysis software, and I had to understand the biology well enough to make useful visualizations. So I was one of the few people that was working with every constituency in the company, from the engineers to the physicists to the biologists. That made me a valuable asset, because I had a holistic view of the company that most people did not have from their functional silos (as an aside, I was talking about this at the last BrainJam, and somebody referred me to Ron Burt’s work on structural holes, which describes this phenomenon of connecting different constituencies. I haven’t had a chance to buy it and read it yet, but it’s definitely on the short list). Working with all of the different folks strengthened my communication skills and led pretty directly to me taking the leap to the management track.

It will be interesting to see if any of this translates to my new life in New York. I’ll have to start building up my network almost from scratch, which will be a painful process for me. But I’m hoping to leverage friends of friends and other weak ties to jump start the process. We’ll see how it goes.

P.S. I forgot to mention this in my New York post, but in case any of y’all were wondering about the lower frequency of posting, it should now be obvious. The spare brain cycles that used to go towards thinking up things to blog about were getting used for thinking about New York. And I’ll probably continue to post sporadically as the brain cycles go towards dealing with the logistics of moving. But I’ll try to toss something up when I have something to say. Even if it’s just commentary on why I have too many parties to go to this weekend

As mentioned in a post last month (gosh, it’s been a while since I’ve been blogging), I co-led a session on “Meta-BrainJamming”, aka “Building a Better BrainJam”. It was interesting to me primarily because there is no “right” way to run one of these things; each of the choices is a design choice. One of the things I learned from what Chris Heuer said at this session was that he envisioned the BrainJams as a series of events, where they would try different things at each event to see what happened and whether they wanted to keep it.

I think the fascinating thing to me is how choices in organization and structure are choices about what kind of community one wants to foster. For instance, the five-minute one-on-one sessions encourage a shallow but broad network of connections - you meet lots of people, but don’t really get to know any of them. But if people end up having hour-and-a-half long conversations with each person, they’ll only meet two or three people per day, and the network suffers from a lack of interconnections. Is one of these “better” than the other? Not necessarily. But the communities they engender will be different.

It was interesting how the one-on-one sessions were perceived by different people. I thought they were really interesting because I did not have an agenda going in, so I was open to following conversations wherever they went. Others were disappointed, because they were trying to find or hire people to help them with projects, and were not able to find appropriate people (partially due to the way the one-on-ones were arranged such that people with ideas talked to people without ideas). But it’s again a choice of communities - being forced to talk to essentially random people opens your eyes in a different way than staying within one’s group.

This idea that communities are a result of these sorts of design choices struck me as a really deep insight at the time. I guess it’s kind of obvious, but it’s something I often forget - that communities don’t just happen or grow autonomously. They are a result of the choices made by its members who create the community collectively. Most of the times those choices are made unthinkingly (e.g. “This is the way everybody else does it”), but the choices are still being made. I think a lot of company leaders need to think about what their culture design choices say about their company. But that’s another rant.

One of the things I really like about Chris’s vision for having regular BrainJams is that he can experiment with different ways of running the BrainJams to see which build the type of community that he’s hoping to build. It’s an almost scientific process, as he tweaks a couple variables, runs the event again, and sees if he likes the results. The first time he tried groups of four to six people as an icebreaker exercise. This last time it was one-on-one sessions. Different advantages and disadvantages to both. I’m looking forward to what they’ll try for the next one.

Another advantage of having regular events is that it will help to build a community. The BrainJams themselves can be used as an opportunity to throw the doors open and meet new people, and then it’s up to individual people to build on and strengthen those connections between the BrainJams. This also balances the insider/outsider dynamic - because I can get in touch with people I met at the last BrainJam and talk to them outside of the BrainJams events, it frees up the BrainJams as a time to meet new people and expand my circle.

Some other concerns that came up at the Meta-Brainjamming session were:

• How to accommodate people that have a specific agenda. There were some people who had projects for which they were looking for people to help them. It was difficult for those people to find other compatible people given the freeform nature of the event. My suggestion was that maybe it would be a good idea to have a way for people with specific agendas to publish them beforehand, so they can be matched up with like-minded souls, while those of us who have no such agendas can go with the random access conversations that currently happen.
• What will happen when these events grow too large? The first two events have been in the 60-80 person range where even though I couldn’t meet everybody, I feel like I met a significant fraction of folks by the end of the day. If the events grew to 200 or 300, it would be too big, I think. But if the size is limited, how should the event be run to ensure that newcomers are welcomed so that the community can get fresh perspectives? Tough questions. It seems like there’s a Dunbar number limit, so maybe any time a particular BrainJams community reaches a size of 100-150, it splits off into two groups (much like Gore and Associates). There could be cross-pollination between groups, but that would accommodate both the need to keep growing and gaining new perspectives, but also the need for each BrainJam community to stay accessible and participatory. Just a thought.
• How to keep track of everybody that we talk to. I think the one-on-one sessions were almost too rushed, because people were trying to squeeze conversations into five minutes, which consisted of two minute introductions by each person, which left only one minute for actual discussion. I think Brian suggested that there need to be more frequent breaks (maybe every three to four conversations) so that people get a chance to jot down some notes about who they’ve talked to while they still remember the conversations, and can follow up to get contact info. This might also be a place where having people fill out a one paragraph summary of their interests in their registration form could come in handy - by cross-referencing names to blurbs, it might be easier to reconstruct which conversations one wanted to follow up on. Of course, it’d be even easier if there were a way to automate the whole process (bar codes? ).

Okay, enough rambling. I’m amazed I’m able to reconstruct as much as I did about where I was going with this post a month ago when I started it. The main insight: communities are designed, either consciously or not. Think about the kinds of communities that your choices engender.

Technorati tags: BrainJams BrainJams3dec2005

As noted previously, I went to a “BrainJam” on Saturday. It was excellent, everything I had hoped it would be. I met a bunch of interesting people, had some thought-provoking conversations, and was left wanting more, even at the end of a long day (9am-7pm) of talking.

In the morning, they started off with essentially speed-dating, where we talked one-on-one to somebody for five minutes, and then rotated. We did this for a couple hours, so I talked to around 15 people, from very different backgrounds ranging from a Google employee who was just getting started with blogs, to a VC who was looking for interesting ideas, to a former CTO of Visa looking for new opportunities, to people from nonprofits looking for tech assistance. I’ll probably post my full notes when I get a chance to type them up.

I was a bit concerned that the 5-minute format would be boring because we’d each be repeating the same introduction over and over again, but I found myself changing my pitch depending on what the other person said. And I was able to get my pitch down better and better, so that was an unexpected side benefit. So that was fun. The frustrating bit was that each time the bell rang it was like “D’oh, we just started to get into a meaty conversation and now we have to stop”. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t have met as many people if they hadn’t enforced the five minute thing. So it’s a balance.

At lunch I sat down at a table with people I hadn’t met yet, and had an conversation with one guy about the medical records system he’s working on and mentioned a reference from Dourish on how people use medical records, which he thought was interesting and relevant.

And there were two women at the table who were talking about trying to set up a website that would let people find out where to get a good cappucino. They were talking about doing data mining, using address references in blogs and the like to extract information, and I suggested that perhaps they should consider leveraging their users with a rating system. And I also suggested that SMS was the way to go, because everybody has a phone with them all the time. So if I SMS’s an address to their number, and it returned five coffee shops nearby with ratings, that would be fantastic. There would be another SMS number to handle ratings (input coffee shop ID or something and a rating). Not quite sure what happens with the UI from there, but it was fun kicking around ideas.

After lunch there were larger group discussions. I ended up accidentally co-leading one on “meta-brainjamming”. The group discussions were meant to be open, so there was a place to sign up to lead sessions, and while I was talking to Brian during one break, we got interrupted once again by Chris Heuer over the PA telling us it was time to stop talking and move on, and Brian and I looked at each other and said “There has to be a better way to do this”, so we signed up to do a session on “Building a Better BrainJam”. The discussion was interesting - we talked about how to improve the conference experience, how to balance the insider/outsider dynamic, how to keep the community alive, how to encourage conversations with people we don’t know, while leaving time to follow up with those we do. I may write up a whole post about it when I get a chance because it ties into thoughts I have about building community.

And I stuck around til the end of the day, even going out to the bar afterwards for a couple hours, where I talked to some of the organizers, so I may get involved with planning the next one in February, especially since they’d like to hold it up in Berkeley/Oakland someplace. I’m supposed to track down a location if I can. Not quite sure how to do that, but maybe I’ll ask Berkeley what their conference hosting facilities are like.

All in all, it was a great day, interesting people, interesting ideas, good times all around. I’m really glad I went, even though my voice ended up being trashed from talking all day, and it left me a little exhausted, neither of which is good entering a concert week. I definitely plan to write up my notes, and maybe more about the meta-BrainJamming session, when I get the chance.

P.S. Oh, I should mention that I won a drawing for “mind-mapping software” from MindJet, one of the sponsors. Since I already view this blog as my external brain, it might be interesting to map it out using that tool. Something to do with my free time. Maybe over Christmas.

P.P.S. For a quick look at what happened, Brian Shields, a reporter from KRON4, did a piece on it for KRON news.

Technorati tags: BrainJams3dec2005

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getting started with blogs:This guy was new to the blogosphere, and was a bit intimidated because he saw all these people updating eight times a day, and couldn’t figure out how he could even keep up reading, let alone writing, if he only had a couple hours a week. This got us into an interesting discussion about whether it was possible to make the blogosphere meaningful at different levels of participation. At the one end, you have the A-list bloggers like Kos and Scoble and the rest of the Technorati 100. How do we take that world and distill it down to something people can absorb in only a few minutes a day?

The analogy I came up with was to the sports world. You have the folks who are hardcore sports addicts, spending hours each day surfing the web for sports opinions, going to all the home games of their team, etc. Then you have the guys who flip on the game on the weekend, and watch a couple hours. And it’s meaningful at all levels of participation. Can we make the blogosphere like that?

I recommended finding some blogs that were lower traffic that did a good job of pointing to interesting conversations that were happening. That’s essentially what my blogroll is now; it’s a personalized information service, pointing me to things I find interesting. I don’t read any newspapers, but interesting articles still find their way to my attention. I also recommended writing what he felt like - not everybody has to write all the time and link to everything.

I wonder if there needs to be a blogosphere starter kit. On the writing blogs side, there’s places like Blogger, LiveJournal, etc. But on the reading side, I don’t really know of a good feed that would introduce folks to the blogosphere gradually, a guided tour, if you will. Granted, most of us who read blogs do so because we came across a blog that we liked, and that linked to another, and that linked to another, etc. But it’s interesting to ponder whether there’s an opportunity for somebody to provide a well-written, well-edited, weekly (daily?) digest of the blogosphere. Of course, this ignores the problem that everybody has their own personal blogosphere, but whatever.

Changing my pitch: The two answers I came up with by the end of the one-on-one sessions were:

• In response to “Why are you here?”, I said that I was interested in how the barriers to making a difference have been lowered. It used to be that you had to be a major corporation to make a difference, because it required big technology, and big marketing efforts. Now a few people can make a huge difference; on the corporate side, 37 Signals is the standard-bearer of smaller is better.

  And the BrainJam itself is a great example. Web2.1 was something dreamed up by Chris Heuer the week before the Web2.0 conference, he sent out a couple emails, posted about it on his blog, and 60 people showed up. It was so successful, they decided to make this a series of events, and about 80 or 90 people showed up on a Saturday for this one. Pretty amazing.

• In response to “What do you do?”, I went with something like “I’m a programmer developing mathematical models for a biotech consulting firm. Although I come from a technical background, the more I work with clients, the more I realize that a technical solution is often not enough. I’ve been in the situation where I delivered exactly what the customer asked for, only to have it rejected because it wasn’t what they wanted. So I’ve started thinking about the whole solution, incorporating not just the technology, but also the community, the environment, the culture, etc.”

Apparently, the Web2.1 BrainJam was successful enough that the organizers decided to do more of them. The next BrainJam is this Saturday in Menlo Park, and I’m planning to be there. Should be interesting meeting more folks, even if I don’t have any projects of my own to talk about or show off.

I’m glad I decided to go to the Web2.1 BrainJam. I was a bit nervous, since I didn’t know anybody there and I don’t do this stuff for a living, but it turned out to be a good time.

Chris Heuer, the organizer, wanted to try doing what he called Speed Brainjamming, and what Christopher Allen called “Knowledge Cafes”. The basic idea was to sit down with a few people you didn’t know, talk for a bit (10-20 minutes), and then they called time, and you moved on to a set of new people. I enjoyed it a lot, meeting a bunch of new people, and hearing a bunch of different ideas. It was interesting the different directions that people are coming at this from: some were academics interested in research, others were entrepreneurs who wanted to know what the business model was, others were thinking of it as a tool to help their own pursuits, whether real estate or nonprofits, and, of course, for me, it’s a hobby. So it was great to hear about how people are thinking about using these new web tools, and I was always a bit disappointed when we had to stop talking and move on to the next group.

A couple conversations I particularly enjoyed:

• Dave Gutelius mentioned how he had started off learning about social networks by following a Sufi brotherhood through the Sahara desert. Now he’s teaching at Stanford, and advising Ishtirak and PlanetQuest, but it’s still about understanding social networks.
• We had a good jamming conversation going with Dan Saffer, Rachel Murray, Michael Ferguson of ask.com, and Eric Lin. Both Dan and Rachel are interaction designers rather than technologists, so they were more interested in the culture than the technology, a perspective I appreciate more and more as I learn that I’m not a technologist. Eric brought up the issue of making Web2.1 available on one’s phone, and I riffed off of how I want my whole life available on my Sidekick. It’s close (the Sidekick enabled me to go on a three week road trip and still always be in phone and email contact), but it’s not quite there.

After four rounds of conversations, the whole group reformed and went to presentations. This was less interactive, which was a bit of a disappointment. But there were a couple gems.

Jeff Jarvis did a great little talk on Recovery 2.0. I knew Jarvis’s name, but had never read his blog or seen him speak before, and I was really impressed. Quotes I liked a lot included:

• “It’s not a medium, it’s a means”, making the point that users aren’t generating content for the sake of content - they’re sharing their lives as communication
• “We need to swarm better” and “congregate to other communities”, taking advantage of the distributed nature of the blogosphere, rather than depending on mass media to do the filtering for us.
• “There is no it, there’s a lot of different its”, along the same lines.

He also pointed out the three prerequisites for effective swarming, using Recovery 2.0 as an example:

1. A place to swarm to, e.g. the Recovery2.0 wiki and the recovery2 tag.
2. Standardization and APIs, so that swarms can interact and communicate effectively, using XML or whatever else works.
3. Face to face meetings, as the best way to get different swarms talking to each other. Diplomacy is best handled in person rather than through technology.

The other presentation I found inspiring was Adam Kalsey’s presentation of Tagyu. Not so much by the idea of Tagyu, although it’s a pretty nifty idea to have a program figure out the appropriate tags given a URL or text. But by his description of the development process. He had the idea on Tuesday, coded it up Wednesday, tested it on Thursday, and demo’d it on Friday. The tools are getting sufficiently high level that the idea, not the technology, is the limiting factor. Makes me want to start learning more of this web stuff, in case I ever have a good idea.

Overall, it was a good experience. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it to the after party due to a prior engagement, so it felt like I had just barely gotten a shallow introduction to these people and the ideas floating around. But I’ll keep my eyes open and hope to make it to more such events in the future.

Thanks go to Chris Heuer for organizing, his girlfriend Kristie for handling all of the logistics, Brian Shields from KRON for finding us the space (it happened in a KRON studio) and producing a piece for the evening news on it, and to everybody else for being interesting and friendly.

Technorati tag: Web2.1 Web2.1BrainJam Web2point1

After waffling for a bit, I decided to go to Web 2.1 after all. I stayed late this evening at work, and I’ll head in early tomorrow, and will probably have to go in over the weekend, but it’s worth it to talk to some folks whose stuff I’ve been reading for a while.

I think the question that I’d like to see discussed is this idea that Web2.1 is for the people. The tools I see out there right now are still very tech-oriented. Ning.com just came out and is designed for people to construct their own social applications. Which is awesome. Except that I’m guessing most people don’t have any ideas for social applications. I know I’m stumped.

I think this is where we may be overselling the idea of Web2.1. It’s like the ever-popular analogy of software to architecture. No matter how easy architecture tools become, the average person isn’t going to be able to do a good job of designing a house, because it takes long years of experience and many rounds of feedback to learn the tricks of the trade. I foresee that many instances of the current round of social software will fizzle out against the same obstacle.

I think a different focus may be in order. Rather than try to give the tools directly to the people, perhaps we should focus on how we design the tools such that they are most useful to people. What are the design principles of Web2.1? I have my own ideas, but it’s a question I hope to hear some different viewpoints on.

Technorati tag: Web2.1

One thing that I noticed in the comments on my “designing for the collective” post was that I have been using Latour’s term “collective” in an extremely fuzzy way, where I change what I mean by it depending on the point I’m trying to make. This got me thinking as to whether this was an appropriate thing to do or not. Problems in communication are often due to imprecision of language, and I was wondering whether my lack of clarity was allowing me to avoid or ignore problems with my line of thought.

After tossing this around for a while, I realized that one of the issues is that “collective” is an extremely general term. Even as Latour used it, it can refer to a wide array of organizations. And yet there was meaning to be extracted from this general term, as he found ways to adapt it to specific situations that he constructed and discussed.

My theory of the moment is that generalizations are useful in part because they are somewhat vague on specifics. They can be adapted to the needs of the local situation. Admittedly, I’m biased since I tend to be a deductive thinker. But let’s consider the extreme opposite case, somebody who observes all of the details around them, but can’t separate the underlying commonalities from those details. They would not recognize that a traffic light is a traffic light whether it’s aligned vertically or horizontally. They would think that different fonts represented different languages. I’m being silly for the sake of argument, but you get the idea. Looking for the underlying general principles in specific situations means throwing away some of the specific details. In the case of traffic lights, it’s the colors and order of the lights that matter, not the orientation. In fonts, it’s the general shape of letters, not the specific details of serifs.

The really brilliant people, the deep thinkers, are the ones who are able to identify useful separations between the general and the specific. They can extract generalizations that apply to a variety of situations that had been heretofore thought completely separate. I’ve discussed the power of theories that apply across different areas before. It’s important to remember that such generalizations are only mental tools. They are not necessarily “right” or “wrong”, because they are both - they are “right” in the sense that they unify observations across several disparate situations, but “wrong” in the sense that they might not apply exactly in any of those particular situations. So they should be judged on whether they are useful or not.

Too many people adopt an all-or-nothing approach to generalizations of this type. In the “all” case, they take the results of the generalization and apply them indiscriminately without regard to specific examples. Prejudices are a good example, where the person will ignore the evidence in front of them in favor of their prejudice.

In the “nothing” case, they think the theory is completely useless because it does not explain all of the details; a lot of critiques of evolution fall along these lines, trying to disprove just one element of evolution (from carbon dating to the fossil record), then standing back and saying “If that one thing is wrong, then the whole thing must be bogus”. Of course, their disproof is often faulty, but that’s another rant.

The true use is somewhere in between, because generalizations are tools. They may not apply in all situations. The user has to take responsibility and decide whether they are appropriate or not, and if they use them, to adapt them to the local situation. This adaptation is like the premise of “Web 2.0″, taking the general tool and building a local adaptation. All of the details might not be right, but the general principle may provide insight that is not apparent from the observations of the specific situation. And it can work the other way - the specifics can help inform revisions of the generalization. One analogy I came up with is that it’s like being under a good manager, one who outlines the overall goals of the project, but leaves it to the employees to figure out how to accomplish those goals using their skills. The relationship works both ways - general goals flowing down, specific plans flowing up - to achieve success.

So this is my theory of why I think some of my posts and theories are sloppy in their language. I am trying to get to general principles and sometimes let the details slip. One of the things I need to work on is to try to figure out how to apply some of my theories to specific situations, going from a descriptive mode to a prescriptive mode. But this idea of the general being adapted to the local is a powerful one that I want to continue exploring.

P.S. In an amusing coincidence, I had sketched out the ideas in this post the morning before I read the “invariant representations” section of On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, which are much the same idea. He’s coming at it from a neuroscience perspective, I’m coming at it from the realm of ideas, but it’s the same idea (finding general representations and applying them to specific situations). So, as usual, that was both satisfying (because my ideas aren’t totally crackpot) and disheartening (he’s already published). I should have read the book long ago - my cognitive subroutines posts are pretty congruent to his theory of intelligence. More coming when I finish it and write a review.

After reading Dav’s post about the Future Commons event, I was inspired to start thinking about what my own Theory of Everything would be. I’ve been following up on a bunch of different threads recently, and I was thinking about ways I might tie them all together.

One issue I have right from the start is that I’m not sure I believe in a Theory of Everything, despite having spent ten years of my life as a particle physicist in pursuit of same. My recent kick about conflicting realities has led me down a different path, one where global rankings are insufficient. It’s all about the context, giving people the tools necessary to adopt the global to their local situation.

Dav mentioned in his post his fondness for the Global Brain idea proposed by Howard Bloom. I was thinking about this today and got caught again in this apparent conflict between global and local. I love the idea of the collective learning machine that Bloom develops, but I want to be able to specify which elements to use. Some people (elements) are going to contribute ideas and preferences that I don’t agree with or don’t apply to me. How do I restrict the inputs to be only people whose opinion I value?

While poking around this idea some more this morning, I realized that one way to view it would be to use the language of Bruno Latour’s book, and call it “Designing for the Collective”. Latour uses the term collective to, as I put it, “indicate everything that is part of our currently described reality”. It is not so much a well-formed object, as a process, one that is “continually encountering new external influences and finding ways to absorb them, such that the collectives are always growing.” What I am really interested in is finding other people whose reality overlaps mine, whose collective I want to participate in. It doesn’t have the scope of the Global Brain, but it has a much better chance of mapping to things I care about.

What would it mean to take a set of overlapping ever-growing collectives as fundamental elements in the social design of technology? For one thing, I would need ways to find out who else might share my values and therefore be prospective members of my collective. I would also have to be able to inspect their collective (what they value) and see which elements of their collective I would like to incorporate into mine. In some sense, I’m asking that the collective’s values be exposed through technology that is accountable in the sense of Garfinkel, where they can be observed and inspected. This is kind of fuzzy, so let’s go to an example that I think illustrates the point nicely.

In a comment on one of my posts, Jofish pointed to a paper that he had co-authored on reflective design (I’ll skip what they mean by reflective design because it’s not relevant to this post, but it’s a good paper - worth reading). One of the case studies they used was of how to apply reflective design in an art museum. The idea was that patrons of an art museum were given a handheld device, from which they could request further information about works of interest. And it stored individual trails through the museum, such that one could look up what other people had seen. More importantly, one could see the trails of other patrons interested in the work that one was viewing, and use those trails to find other works that one might find appealing. It’s not a strict “majority rules” democracy that a global brain might be, only rewarding the popular works. It allows people to find kindred spirits (other collectives) and follow them through the museum. In a sense, it’s exposing the long tail of the global brain.

When I was describing this to my friend Eli, he pointed out a much more well-known example would be Amazon’s use of such technology to let you know that “Customers who bought this book also bought” or “Customers who viewed this book also viewed”. Again, it allows me to find “people like me” and see what they found interesting.

So after mulling it over today, I think that this is my current Theory of Everything: taking the idea of ever-growing collectives seriously as the basis for our cooperatively-constructed, sometimes-overlapping realities. I think that it could be used to come up with design principles that are fundamentally different than what we have now. There is no one “right” way to design something, because different collectives have different needs and different values. Figuring out ways to allow different people access to other collectives’ values in a way that respects privacy is going to be interesting. But I’m attracted to the concept of these little small-scale collectives agglomerating together in support of various things (probably my romantic anarchic tendencies showing).

I also think this idea of designing for the collective could be the basis for a larger scale work pretty easily. I’m inspired by Dourish, who uses the somewhat obscure philosophical ideas of phenomenology to construct new design principles for human computer interaction. I think that it would be just as valid to take Latour’s idea of collectives and use that as the basis for design principles in social software. The posts I’ve done on Latour could serve as the basis for the introductory chapter on his philosophy, and I could work from there. I’m going to kick this around some more, and see if I can figure out practical ways in which I can apply these ideas. Feedback always welcome.

Amazon link

This book is an attempt by Dourish to develop underlying design principles for user interfaces that take into account the situated nature of interaction. I’ve been mentioning Dourish’s book recently (e.g. here, here, and here), because I really like a lot of the concepts that he mentions throughout his book.

Dourish is explicitly building on Lucy Suchman’s work by examining the ways in which computing is becoming more of a situated action. Suchman’s book was written in 1987, when the prevailing mode of interaction with a computer was sitting at a desk. Dourish, writing in 2001, uses tangible computing and social computing as examples of how computing is breaking out of the user-computer interaction mode, and becoming more a part of the environment. By tangible computing, he’s referring to the increasingly ubiquitous presence of computing in every device, leading us towards methods of interaction other than a keyboard and mouse. In social computing, he’s referring less to Friendster-like services than to the increasing awareness of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field of the social matrix in which computing is embedded, as I discuss obliquely in this post.

After setting the stage for the rise of what he calls “embodied interaction”, he brings in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, the most famous proponent of which is Heidegger. One might wonder what the relevance is of Heidegger, a philosopher whose work is nigh impenetrable, to user interaction, but I’ve already written a post about it. Phenomenology provides a framework of ideas which provide a new set of assumptions for interaction design. Or, as the book’s subtitle states, the philosophical ideas can provide the “foundations for embodied interaction”.

After the detour into philosophy, Dourish brings the book back towards practical considerations and attempts to formulate principles that take this design framework into account. One of the things I took away from his discussion of principles was that meaning resides on multiple levels. An example I’ve already discussed is the distinction between present-at-hand vs. ready-to-hand. But it can extend beyond that. The user needs to be able to flip between many ways of using the tool. For example, when developing a presentation, I may be:

• Looking at Powerpoint’s help files to figure out how to do something
• Designing a particular slide layout
• Figuring out the overall outline of slides to create the most cohesive presentation flow
• Thinking about how a particular slide will be received by my manager
• Thinking about how that slide will be received by the customer.

Each level of how I relate to the presentation has different requirements for interaction. And I will flip back and forth between the levels, and there’s often no way for the software to know at which level I am working.

Another principle that is illustrated by this example is how the user creates meaning. Of those various levels I suggested, the last two are of meaning only to me, and how I make that connection to the software is only going to be of relevance to me. So both of these principles demonstrate how important it is for the software to be “accountable” in the sense of Garfinkel, meaning that the software’s workings are transparent and discoverable, such that the user _can_ construct their own levels of meaning on top of the software or, to use other terminology I’ve used, incorporated into the user’s cognitive subroutines or internal collective.

Latour’s idea of collectives is actually entirely relevant to this discussion, now that I think about it. The principles that Dourish is describing as being relevant to embodied interaction are the same principles that Latour observes as being important for the collective, that participants must be available for consultation such that proper decisions can be made by the collective, giving all elements due process. Huh. That connection just occurred to me, but I like it. I will have to think about it some more.

I’m going to wrap things up here. I’m sure Dourish’s ideas will continue to be crop up in my posts over the next few months. Apologies for this post’s semi-incoherence - I wrote it while watching football, so I was losing my train of thought every minute or so. That wraps it up for this week’s round of Book Review Weekend posts. I think the only book that I’ve finished but haven’t written up is still the Jane Jacobs book. One of these days…

Even though it’s late and I’m tired (I went to Dorkbot this evening, which was surprisingly disappointing), I’m just going to keep on trucking, because I sketched out another post while driving to work this morning, picking up on one of the threads I left hanging at the end of yesterday’s post, which is the relationship of accountable interfaces to the Internet.

One of the things that has made the growth of the Internet so dramatically rapid is that the interface is open all the way down. From HTML down to TCP/IP, you can open up the black boxes and see what’s going on inside, which means that you can build stuff on top of those abstractions without fear that something underneath is going to break what you’re building. And, more importantly, the network is open and stupid. If you format things properly, the routers will take it and send it. Whether you’re doing multimedia or voice or text or anything else, as far as the routers are concerned, they’re just packets being sent from one place to the other.

Why has this led to rapid growth and development? Because anybody can try anything. The openness of the protocols makes it possible to figure out how to construct new applications on top of the abstractions already in place. And the openness of the network means that nobody can block those new applications from replicating virally as people discover them.

All this has been said before, of course. But I want to pause for a moment and use the terms I introduced yesterday to examine the Internet as an interface. The fact that you can examine each of the protocols and find out how they work makes the Internet interface accountable in the sense that its workings are observable and reportable. I’m not quite sure how to classify the openness of the network, but it could be construed as a variation of charming, in that it invites experimentation and interaction, because nothing is forbidden. And in an epistemological sleight-of-hand, I’m going to claim that we can see how powerful an accountable, charming interface can be, by labelling the Internet as such an interface and holding up its manifest success.

So where do we go from here? The next phase of the web is being called Web 2.0, whatever the heck that means. The basic idea, as far as I can tell, is that people have continued to build yet another layer on top of the existing internet protocols, and now we’re all going to start using each other’s tools in one big glorious technical mashup. In particular, the tools are getting simple enough to combine that non-technical users can generate their own combinations of tools in new and interesting ways (danah boyd refers to the godawful neologism of glocalization in her post on the subject). Users can create their own applications by building with each other’s blocks. But for this to happen, the blocks need to exhibit the same characteristics that I claimed for the Internet protocols above. They need to be accountable and open, such that users can determine whether the blocks are appropriate to their needs. And they should be charming, inviting the user to experiment with them, to play with them, to figure out new uses for them.

I’m going to step back for a second and drop in a design principle of embodied interaction that Dourish postulates: “Users, not designers, create and communicate meaning.” What does he mean by this? He’s making the point that a designer can tell a user all day what an icon is supposed to mean, but the user defines the meaning for themselves. Another example that Dourish uses is that an artifact designed for one thing may be used for a completely different purpose by the user, adapted to fit their needs by the exigencies of their situation. Another way of putting it is that “Users create uses.” Without users, the interface or artifact is a meaningless conglomeration of technology. Users decide how it is to be used, thereby giving it meaning.

Applying this to the world of Web 2.0, we can see that in a world where users are creating their own applications from the building blocks of other web artifacts and interfaces, the users are creating their own uses in a very real sense. And thus taking into account the interfaces of the building blocks that we are creating is going to be important to continue to enable this creation of uses. As I mentioned in the technical mashup post, the exponential growth of combinations possible with an increasing number of building blocks combinable in different ways is reminiscent of speculations on how complex behavior in the form of life first started. Will Web2.0 enable the next phase of our evolution? Okay, that’s too pretentious even for me, but it’s interesting to speculate on how each layer enabled by the appropriate interface decisions of the layer below, creating ever more complexity.