Information Architecture, User Experience & Other Obsessions
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I presented this talk at the IA Summit in San Diego this year, back in the spring. I’m adding it to inkblurt so it’ll have a home here, but I already wrote about it over at TUG a few months ago.
It’s all about how language makes stuff in the world that we need to treat like serious parts of our environment — material for design — and how there’s no such thing as “just semantics.”
Throughout 2013 and part of 2014, I gave various versions of a talk entitled “The World is the Screen”. (The subtitle varied.)
The general contention of the talk: as planners and makers of digital things and places that are increasingly woven into the fabric of the world around us, we have to expand our focus to understanding the whole environment that people inhabit, not just specific devices and interfaces.
As part of that mission, we need to bring a more rigorous perspective to understanding our materials. Potters and masons and painters, as they mature in their work, come to understand their materials better and more deeply than they would expect the users of their creations to understand them. I argue that our primary material is information … but we don’t have a good, shared concept of what we mean when we say “information.”
Rather than trying to define information in just one way, I picked three major ways in which information affects our world, and the characteristics behind each of those modes. Ultimately, I’m trying to create some foundations for maturing how we understand our work, and how it is more about environments than objects (though objects are certainly critical in the context of the whole).
Anyway … the last version of the talk I gave was at ConveyUX in Seattle. It is a shorter version, but I think it’s the most concisely clear one. So I’m embedding it below. [Other, prior (and longer) versions are also on Speakerdeck – one from IA Summit 2013, and one from Blend Conference 2013. I also posted about it at The Understanding Group.]
The 2013 World IA Day was a huge success. Only its 2nd year in existence, and it had big crowds in 20+ locations (15 official). Congratulations to everyone involved in organizing the day, and to the intrepid board members of the IA Institute who decided to risk transforming the more US-based IDEA conference into this terrific, global, community-driven event.
I was fortunate to be asked to speak at the event in Ann Arbor, MI, where I talked about how information shapes context — the topic I’ve been writing a book about for a while now. I’ll probably continue having new permutations of this talk for quite some time, but here’s a snapshot at least, describing some central ideas I’m fleshing out in the book. I’m calling this “beta 2” — since it has somewhat different and/or updated content vs the one I did for CHI Atlanta back in the fall of 2012.
Video and Slides-with-notes embedded below. Enjoy!
Andrea Resmini and co-organizers of the upcoming workshop on Architectures of Meaning (part of the Pervasive Computing conference at Newcastle University in the UK) asked me to participate this year. I’m not able to be there in person, unfortunately, but plan to join remotely. What follows is the “paper” I’m presenting. It’s not a fully fledged academic piece of writing — more like a practitioner-theorist missive.
I’m sharing it here because others may be curious, and it’s also the best summary I’ve done to date of the ideas in the book I’m writing on IA and designing context.
This is a straight dump from MS Word (with a few tweaks). Caveat emptor.
Information Architecture and the Composition of Context
Andrew Hinton
Final Draft for Architectures of Meaning Workshop
June 18, 2012
Introduction
We lack fully articulated models for context, yet information architecture is especially significant in how context is created, changed or communicated in digital-based information environments. This thesis proposes some principles, models and foundational theories for the beginnings of a framework of context and proposes composition as a rubric for tying these ideas together into IA practice.
The thesis follows a line of reasoning thus:
Context is constructed.
There’s a deep and wide intellectual history around the topic of context. Suffice it to say that there are many layers and threads in the ongoing conversation among experts on the subject. Even though all those threads don’t agree on every point, they add up to some generally accepted ideas, such as:
Context is not so simple as “object A is in surrounding circumstance X” — the roles are interchangeable and interdependent. This is why context is so hard to get our hands around as a topic.
(In particular, I’m leaning on the work of Paul Dourish, Bonnie Nardi, Jean Lave, Marcia Bates and Lucy Suchman.)
Context is about understanding.
This phenomenological & post-modern frame for context necessarily complicates the topic — not to point out these complexities would keep us from getting at a real comprehension of how context works.
Still, it can be helpful to have a simple model to use as a compass in this Escher-like landscape. Hence, the following:
Context is conventionally defined as the interplay between several elements:
Context, then, is principally about understanding. There is no need for discussion of context unless someone (agent) is trying to understand a subject in a given situation. That is, context does not exist out in the world as a thing in itself. It emerges from the act of seeking to understand.
This also forms a useful, simple model for talking about context and parsing the elements in a given scenario. However, it gets more complicated due to the ideas, mentioned above, about how context is constructed. Just a few of the wrinkles that come to light:
As you can see, what looks like a simple grammar of what makes context can actually expose a lot of complexity. But this simple model of elements helps us at least start to have a framework for picking apart scenarios to figure out who is perceiving what, which elements are affecting others, and where understanding is and isn’t happening.
In order to unravel this massive tapestry, we have to grab a thread; a good one to grab is what we mean by “understanding.”
And that means we have to understand cognition, which is the engine we use for understanding much of anything.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about responsiveness in design, and how we can build systems that work well in so many different contexts, on so many different devices, for so many different scenarios. So many of our map-like ways of predicting and designing for complexity are starting to stretch at the seams. I have to think we are soon reaching a point where our maps simply will not scale.
Then there are the secret-sauce, “smart” solutions that promise they can take care of the problem. It seems to happen on at least every other project: one or more stakeholders are convinced that the way to make their site/app/system truly responsive to user needs is to employ some kind of high-tech, cutting-edge technology.
This can take the form of clippy-like “helpers” that magically know what the user needs, to “conversation engines” that try to model a literal conversational interaction with users, like Jellyvision, or established technologies like the “collaborative filtering” technique pioneered by places like Amazon.
Most of the time, these sorts of solutions hold out more promise than they can fulfill. They aren’t bad ideas — even Clippy had merit as a concept. But to my mind, more often than not, these fancy approaches to the problem are a bit like building a 747 to take people across a river — when all that’s needed is a good old-fashioned bridge. That is, most of the time the software in question isn’t doing the basics. Build a bridge first, then let’s talk about the airliner.
Of course, there are genuine design challenges that do seem to still need that super-duper genius-system approach. But I still think there are more “primitive” methods that can do most of the work by combining simple mechanisms and structures that can actually handle a great deal of complexity.
We have a cognitive bias that makes us think that anything that seems to respond to a situation in a “smart” way must be “thinking” its way through the solution. But it turns out, that’s not how nature solves complex problems — it’s not even really how our bodies and brains work.
I think the best kind of responsiveness would follow the model we see in nature — a sort of “embodied” responsiveness.
I’ve been learning a lot about this through research for the book on designing context I’m working on now. There’s a lot to say about this … a lot … but I need to spend my time writing the book rather than a blog post, so I’ll try to explain by pointing to a couple of examples that may help illustrate what I mean.
Consider two robots.
One is Honda’s famous Asimo. It’s a humanoid robot that is intricately programmed to handle situations … for which it is programmed. It senses the world, models the world in its brain and then tells the body what to do. This is, by the way, pretty much how we’ve assumed people get around in the world: the brain models a representation of the world around us and tells our body to do X or Y. What this means in practice, however, is that Asimo has a hard time getting around in the wild. Modeling the world and telling the limbs what to do based on that theoretical model is a lot of brain work, so Asimo has some major limitations in the number of situations it can handle. In fact, it falls down a lot (as in this video) if the terrain isn’t predictable and regular, or if there’s some tiny error that throws it off. Even when Asimo’s software is capable of handling an irregularity, it often can’t process the anomaly fast enough to make the body react in time. This, in spite of the fact that Asimo has one of the most advanced “brains” ever put into a robot.
Another robot is nicknamed Big Dog, by a company called Boston Dynamics. This robot is not pre-programmed to calculate its every move. Instead, its body is engineered to respond in smart, contextually relevant ways to the terrain. Big Dog’s brain is actually very small and primitive, but the architecture of its body is such that its very structure handles irregularity with ease, as seen in this video where, about 30 seconds in, someone tries to kick it over and it rights itself.
The reason why Big Dog can handle unpredictable situations is that its intelligence is embodied. It isn’t performing computations in a brain — the body is structured in such a way that it “figures out” the situation by the very nature of its joints, angles and articulation. The brain is just along for the ride, and providing a simple network for the body to talk to itself. As it turns out, this is actually much more like how humans get around — our bodies handle a lot more of our ‘smartness’ than we realize.
I won’t go into much more description here. (And if you want to know more, check this excellent blog post on the topic of the robots, which links/leads to more great writing on embodied/extended cognition & related topics.)
The point I’m getting at is that there’s something to be learned here in terms of how we design information environments. Rather than trying to pre-program and map out every possible scenario, we need systems that respond intelligently by the very nature of their architectures.
A long time ago, I did a presentation where I blurted out that eventually we will have to rely on compasses more than maps. I’m now starting to get a better idea of what I meant. Simple rules, simple structures, that combine to be a “nonlinear dynamical system.” The system should perceive the user’s actions and behaviors and, rather than trying to model in some theoretical brain-like way what the user needs, the system’s body (for lack of a better way to put it) should be engineered so that its mechanisms bend, bounce and react in such a way that the user feels as if the system is being pretty smart anyway.
At some point I’d like to have some good examples for this, but the ones I’m working on most diligently at the moment are NDA-bound. When I have time I’ll see if I can “anonymize” some work well enough to share. In the meantime, keep an eye on those robots.
Tonight, I ran across some files from 2002 (10 yrs ago), some of which were documents from the founding of the IA Institute. At some point I need to figure out what to do with all that.
But among these files was a text clipping that looks as if it was probably part of a response I was composing for a mailing list or something. And it struck me that I’ve been obsessing over the same topics for at least 10 years. Which is … comforting… but also disconcerting. I suppose i’m glad I’m finally writing a book on some of these issues because now maybe I can exorcise them and move on.
Here’s the text clipping.
I agree it’s not specific to the medium. If you can call the Internet a medium. I really think it’s about creating spaces from electrons rather than whole atoms.
If putting two bricks together is architecture (Mies), then putting two words together is writing. The point is that you’re doing architecture or writing, but not necessarily well. Both acts have to be done with a rationale, with intention and skill. And their ultimate success as designs depend upon how well they are used and/or understood.
But what about putting two ideas together, when the ideas manifest themselves not as words alone, but as conceptual spaces that are experienced physically, with clicking fingers and darting eyeballs. No walking necessary, just some control that’s quick enough to follow each connecting thought.
What really separates IA from writing? I could say that putting About and Careers together is “writing” … It’s a phrase “about careers.” But if I put About and Careers together in the global navigation of a website, with perhaps a single line between them to separate them, there’s another meaning implied altogether.
Yet those labels are just the signs representing larger concepts, that bring with them their own baggage and associations, and that get even weirder when we put them together (they tend to exert force on one another, like gravity, in their juxtaposition). The decision to name them as they are, to place the entryways (signs/labels) to these areas in a globally accessible area of the interface, to group them together, and how the resulting “rooms” of this house unfold within those concepts — that’s information architecture.
We use many tools for the structuring of this information within these conceptual rooms, and these can include controlled vocabularies, thesauri, etc. There is a whole, deep, ancient and respected science behind these tools alone. But just as physics and enginnering do not make up the whole of physical Architecture, these tools do not make up the whole of Information Architecture.
Why did we not have to think about this stuff very much before the Web? Because no electron-based shared realities were quite so universally accessed before. Yes, we had HCI and LIS. Yes, we had interaction design and information design. We had application design and workflow and ethnographic discovery methods and business logic and networked information.
But the Web brings with it the serendipitous combination of language, pictures, and connections between one idea and another based on nothing but thought. Previous information systems were tied primarily to their directory structures. But marrying hypertext (older than the web) to an easy open source language (html) and nearly universal access, instantaneously from around the world (unlike hypertext applications and documents, such as we made with HyperCard) created an entirely new entity that we still haven’t gotten our heads around quite yet.
We’re still drawing on cave walls, but the drawings become new caves that connect to other caves. All we have to do is write the sign, the word, the picture, whatever, on the wall, and we’ve brought another place into being.
I wonder if Information Architecture can be seen as Architecture without having to worry so much about time and space? Traditional architecture sans protons and nuclei?
What if Jerusalem were an information space rather than a physical one? I wonder if many faiths could then somehow live there together in peace, with some clever profile-based dynamic interface control? (One user sees a temple, another sees a mosque?)
I wonder if Information Architecture is more about anthills and cowpaths than semantic hierarchies?
I wonder if MUSH’s, MOO’s and Multiplayer Quake already took Information Architecture as far as it’ll ever go, and we’re just trying to get business-driven IA to catch up?
Reading this now is actually disturbing to me. Not unlike if I were Jack Torrance’s wife looking at his manuscript in The Shining … but then realizing I was Jack. Or something.
So. Exorcism. Gotta keep writing.
I’ve been presenting on this topic for quite a while. It’s officially an obsession. And I’m happy to say there’s actually a lot of attention being paid to context lately, and that is a good thing. But it’s mainly from the perspective of designing for existing contexts in the world, and accommodating or responding appropriately to them.
For example, the ubicomp community has been researching this issue for many years — if computing is no longer tied to a few discrete devices and is essentially happening everywhere, in all sorts of parts of our environment, how can we make sure it responds in relevant, even considerate ways to its users?
Likewise, the mobile community has been abuzz about the context of particular devices, and how to design code and UI that shapes the experience based on the device’s form factor, and how to balance the strengths of native apps vs web apps.
And the Content Strategy practitioner community has been adroitly handling the challenges of writing for the existing audience, situational & media contexts that content may be published or syndicated into.
All of these are worthy subjects for our attention, and very complex challenges for us to figure out. I’m on board with any and all of these efforts.
But I genuinely think there’s a related, but different issue that is still a blind spot: we don’t only have to worry about designing for existing contexts, we also have to understand that we are often designing context itself.
In essence, we’ve created a new dimension, an information dimension that we walk around in simultaneously with the one where we evolved as a species; and this dimension can significantly change the meaning of our actions and interactions, with the change of a software rule, a link name or a label. There are no longer clear boundaries between “here” and “there” and reality is increasingly getting bent into disorienting shapes by this pervasive layer of language & soft-machinery.
My thinking on this central point has evolved over the last four to five years, since I first started presenting on the topic publicly. I’ve since been including a discussion of context design in almost every talk or article I’ve written.
I’m posting below my 10-minute “punchy idea” version developed for the WebVisions conference (iterations of this were given in Portland, Atlanta & New York City).
I’m also working on a book manuscript on the topic, but more on that later as it takes more shape (and as the publisher details are ironed out).
I’m really looking forward to delving into the topic with the attention and breadth it needs for the book project (with trepidation & anxiety, but mostly the positive kind ;-).
Of course, any and all suggestions, thoughts, conversations or critiques are welcome.
PS: as I was finishing up this post, John Seely Brown (whom I consider a patron saint) tweeted this bit: “context is something we constantly underplay… with today’s tools we can now create context almost as easily as content.” Synchronicity? More likely just a result of his writing soaking into my subconscious over the last 12-13 years. But quite validating to read, regardless :-)
I’m pasting the SlideShare-extracted notes below for reference.
Read the rest of this entry »
To celebrate the recent publication of Resmini & Rosati’s “Pervasive Information Architecture,” I’m reprinting, here, my contribution to the book. Thank you, Andrea & Luca, for asking me to add my own small part to the work!
It’s strange how, over time, some things that were once rare and wondrous can become commonplace and practically unnoticed, even though they have as much or more power as they ever had. Consider things like these: fire; the lever; the wheel; antibiotics; irrigation; agriculture; the semiconductor; the book. Ironically, it’s their inestimable value that causes these inventions to be absorbed into culture so thoroughly that they become part of the fabric of societies adopting them, where their power is taken for granted.
Add to that list two more items, one very old and one very new: the map and the hyperlink.
Those of us who are surrounded by inexpensive maps tend to think of them as banal, everyday objects – a commoditized utility. And the popular conception of mapmaking is that of an antiquated, tedious craft, like book binding or working a letter-press – something one would only do as a hobby, since after all, the whole globe has been mapped by satellites at this point; and we can generate all manner of maps for free from the Internet.
But the ubiquity of maps also shows us how powerful they remain. And the ease with which we can take them for granted belies the depth of skill, talent and dedicated focus it takes for maps (and even mapping software and devices) to be designed and maintained. It’s easy to scoff at cartography as a has-been discipline – until you’re trying to get somewhere, or understand a new place, and the map is poorly made.
Consider as well the hyperlink. A much younger invention than the map, the hyperlink was invented in the mid-1960s. For years it was a rare creature living only in technology labs, until around 1987 when it was moderately popularized in Apple’s HyperCard application. Even then, it was something used mainly by hobbyists and educators and a few interactive-fiction authors; a niche technology. But when Tim Berners-Lee placed that tiny creature in the world-wide substrate of the Internet, it bloomed into the most powerful cultural engine in human history.
And yet, within only a handful of years, people began taking the hyperlink for granted, as if it had always been around. Even now, among the digital classes, mention of “the web” is often met with a sniff of derision. “Oh that old thing — that’s so 1999.” And, “the web is obsolete – what matters now are mobile devices, augmented reality, apps and touch interfaces.”
One has to ask, however, what good would any of the apps, mobile devices and augmented reality be without digital links?
Where these well-meaning people go wrong is to assume the hyperlink is just a homely little clickable bit of text in a browser. The browser is an effective medium for hyperlinked experience, but it’s only one of many. The hyperlink is more than just a clicked bit of text in a browser window — it’s a core element for the digital dimension; it’s the mechanism that empowers regular people to point across time and space and suddenly be in a new place, and to create links that point the way for others as well.
Once people have this ability, they absorb it into their lives. They assume it will be available to them like roads, or language, or air. They become so used to having it, they forget they’re using it — even when dazzled by their shiny new mobile devices, augmented reality software and touch-screen interfaces. They forget that the central, driving force that makes those technologies most meaningful is how they enable connections — to stories, knowledge, family, friends. And those connections are all, essentially, hyperlinks: pointers to other places in cyberspace. Links between conversations and those conversing — links anybody can create for anybody to use.
This ability is now so ubiquitous, it’s virtually invisible. The interface is visible, the device is tangible, but the links and the teeming, semantic latticeworks they create are just short of corporeal. Like gravity, we can see its physical effects, but not the force itself. And yet these systems of links — these architectures of information — are now central to daily life. Communities rely on them to constructively channel member activity. Businesses trust systems of links to connect their customers with products and their business partners with processes. People depend on them for the most mundane tasks — like checking the weather — to the most important, such as learning about a life-changing diagnosis.
In fact, the hyperlink and the map have a lot in common. They both describe territories and point the way through them. They both present information that enables exploration and discovery. But there is a crucial difference: maps describe a separate reality, while hyperlinks create the very territory they describe.
Each link is a new path — and a collection of paths is a new geography. The meaningful connections we create between ourselves and the things in our lives were once merely spoken words, static text or thoughts sloshing around in our heads. Now they’re structural — instantiated as part of a digital infrastructure that’s increasingly interwoven with our physical lives. When you add an old friend on a social network, you create a link unlike any link you would have made by merely sending a letter or calling them on the phone. It’s a new path from the place that represents your friend to the place that represents you. Two islands that were once related only in stories and memories, now connected by a bridge.
Or think of how you use a photograph. Until recently, it was something you’d either frame and display on a shelf, carry in your wallet, or keep stored in a closet. But online you can upload that photo where it has its own unique location. By creating the place, you create the ability to link to it — and the links create paths, which add to the the ever-expanding geography of cyberspace.
Another important difference between the hyperlinks and traditional maps is that digital space allows us to create maps with conditional logic. We can create rules that cause a place to respond to, interact with, and be rearranged by its inhabitants. A blog can allow links to add comments or have them turned off; a store can allow product links to rearrange themselves on shelves in response to the shopper’s area of interest; a phone app can add a link to your physical location or not, at the flick of a settings switch. These are architectural structures for informational mediums; the machinery that enables everyday activity in the living web of the networked dimension.
The great challenge of information architecture is to design mechanisms that have deep implications for human experience, using a raw material no one can see except in its effects. It’s to create living, jointed, functioning frameworks out of something as disembodied as language, and yet create places suitable for very real, physical purposes. Information architecture uses maps and paths to create livable habitats in the air around us, folded into our daily lives — a new geography somehow separate, yet inseparable, from what came before.
I was lucky enough to be part of a panel at this year’s IA Summit that included Andrea Resmini and Jorge Arango (thanks to Jorge for suggesting the idea and including me!). We had at least 100 show up to hear it, and it seemed to go over well. Eventually there will be a podcast, I believe. Please also read Andrea’s portion, and Jorge’s portion, because they are both excellent.
Update: There’s now an archive of podcasts from IA Summit 2011! And here’s a direct link to the podcast for this session (mp3). Or see them on iTunes.
A while back, I posted a rant about information architecture that invoked the term “cyberspace.” I, of course, received some flack for using that word. It’s played out, people say. It invokes dusty 80s-90s “virtual reality” ideas about a separate plane of existence … Tron-like cyber-city vistas, bulky goggles & body-suits, and dystopian worlds. Ok…yeah, whatever. For most people that’s probably true.
So let’s start from a different angle …
Over the last 20 years or so, we’ve managed to cause the emergence of a massive, global, networked dimension of human experience, enabled by digital technology.
It’s the dimension you visit when you’re sitting in the coffee shop catching up on your Twitter or Facebook feed. You’re “here” in the sense of sitting in the coffee shop. But you’re also “there” in the sense of “hanging out ‘on’ <Twitter/Facebook/Whatever>.”
It’s the dimension brave, unhappy citizens of Libya are “visiting” when they read, in real-time, the real words of regular people in Tunisia and Egypt, that inspire them to action just as powerfully as if those people were protesting right next to them. It may not be the dimension where these people physically march and bleed, but it’s definitely one dimension where the marching and bleeding matter.
I say “dimension” because for me that word doesn’t imply mutual exclusivity between “physical” and “virtual”: you can be in more than one “dimension” at once. It’s a facet of reality, but a facet that runs the length and breadth of that reality. The word “layer” doesn’t work, because “layer” implies a separate stratum. (Even though I’ve used “layer” off and on for a long time too…)
This dimension isn’t carbon-based, but information-based. It’s specifically human, because it’s made for, and bound together with, human semantics and cognition. It’s the place where “knowledge work” mostly happens. But it’s also the place where, more and more, our stories live, and where we look to make sense of our lives and our relationships.
What do we call this thing?
Back in 2006, Wired Magazine had a feature on how “Cyberspace is Dead.” They made the same points about the term that I mention above, and asked some well-known futurist-types to come up with a new term. But none of the terms they mentioned have seemed to stick. One person suggests “infosphere” … and I myself tried terms like “infospace” in the past. But I don’t hear anyone using those words now.
Even “ubiquitous computing” (Vint Cerf’s suggestion, but the late Mark Weiser’s coinage) has remained a specialized term of art within a relatively small community. Plus, honestly, it doesn’t capture the dimensionality I describe above … it’s fine as a term for the activity of “computing” (hello, antiquated terminology) from anywhere, and for reminding us that computing technology is ubiquitously present, but doesn’t help us talk about the “where” that emerges from this activity.
There have been excellent books about this sort of dimension, with titles like Everyware, Here Comes Everybody, Linked, Ambient Findability, Smart Things … books with a lot of great ideas, but without a settled term for this thing we’ve made.
Of course, this begs the question: why do we need a term for it? As one of the people quoted in the Wired article says, aren’t we now just talking about “life”? Yeah, maybe that’s OK for most people. We used to say “e-business” because it was important to distinguish internet-based business from regular business … but in only a few years, that distinction has been effaced to meaninglessness. What business *isn’t* now networked in some way?
Still, for people like me who are tasked with designing the frameworks — the rule sets and semantic structures, the links and cross-experiential contexts, I think it’s helpful to have a term of art for this dimension … because it behaves differently from the legacy space we inherited.
It’s important to be able to point at this dimension as a distinct facet of the reality we’re creating, so we can talk about its nature and how best to design for it. Otherwise, we go about making things using assumptions hardwired into our brains from millions of years of physical evolution, and miss out on the particular power (and overlook the dangers) of this new dimension.
So, maybe let’s take a second look at “cyberspace” … could it be redeemed?
At the Institute for the Future, there’s a paper called “Blended Reality” (yet another phrase that hasn’t caught on). In the abstract, there’s a nicely phrased statement [emphasis mine]:
We are creating a new kind of reality, one in which physical and digital environments, media, and interactions are woven together throughout our daily lives. In this world, the virtual and the physical are seamlessly integrated. Cyberspace is not a destination; rather, it is a layer tightly integrated into the world around us.
The writer who coined the term, William Gibson, was quoted in the “Cyberspace is Dead” piece as saying, “I think cyberspace is past its sell-by, but the problem is that everything has become an aspect of, well, cyberspace.” This strikes me, frankly, as a polite way of saying “yeah I get your point, but I don’t think you get what I mean these days by the term.” Or, another paraphrase: I agree the way people generally understand the term is dated and feels, well, spoiled like milk … but maybe you need to understand that’s not cyberspace …”
Personally, I think Gibson sees the neon-cyberpunk-cityscape, virtual-reality conception of cyberspace as pretty far off the mark. In articles and interviews I’ve read over the years, he’s referenced it on and off … but seems conscious of the fact that people will misunderstand it, and finds himself explaining his points with other language.
Frankly, though, we haven’t listened closely enough. In the same magazine as the “Cyberspace is Dead” article, seven years prior, Gibson posted what I posit to be one of the foundational texts for understanding this… whatever … we’ve wrought. It’s an essay about his experience with purchasing antique watches on eBay, called “My Obsession.” I challenge anyone to read this piece and then come up with a better term for what he describes.
It’s beautiful … so read the whole thing. But I’m going to quote the last portion here in full:
In Istanbul, one chill misty morning in 1970, I stood in Kapali Carsi, the grand bazaar, under a Sony sign bristling with alien futurity, and stared deep into a cube of plate glass filled with tiny, ancient, fascinating things.
Hanging in that ancient venue, a place whose on-site café, I was told, had been open, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, literally for centuries, the Sony sign – very large, very proto-Blade Runner, illuminated in some way I hadn’t seen before – made a deep impression. I’d been living on a Greek island, an archaeological protectorate where cars were prohibited, vacationing in the past.
The glass cube was one man’s shop. He was a dealer in curios, and from within it he would reluctantly fetch, like the human equivalent of those robotic cranes in amusement arcades, objects I indicated that I wished to examine. He used a long pair of spring-loaded faux-ivory chopsticks, antiques themselves, their warped tips lent traction by wrappings of rubber bands.
And with these he plucked up, and I purchased, a single stone bead of great beauty, the color of apricot, with bright mineral blood at its core, to make a necklace for the girl I’d later marry, and an excessively mechanical Swiss cigarette lighter, circa 1911 or so, broken, its hallmarked silver case crudely soldered with strange, Eastern, aftermarket sigils.
And in that moment, I think, were all the elements of a real futurity: all the elements of the world toward which we were heading – an emerging technology, a map that was about to evert, to swallow the territory it represented. The technology that sign foreshadowed would become the venue, the city itself. And the bazaar within it.
But I’m glad we still have a place for things to change hands. Even here, in this territory the map became.
I’ve written before about how the map has become the territory. But I’d completely forgotten, until today, this piece I read over 10 years ago. Fitting, I suppose, that I should rediscover it now by typing a few words into Google, trying to find an article I vaguely remembered reading once about Gibson and eBay. As he says earlier in the piece quoted above, “We are mapping literally everything, from the human genome to Jaeger two-register chronographs, and our search engines grind increasingly fine.”
Names are important, powerful things. We need a name for this dimension that is the map turned out from itself, to be its own territorial reality. I’m not married to “cyberspace” — I’ll gladly call it something else.
What’s important to me is that we have a way to talk about it, so we can get better at the work of designing and making for it, and within it.
Note: Thanks to Andrea Resmini & Luca Rosati for involving me in their work on the upcoming book, Pervasive IA, from which I gleaned the reference to the Institute for the Future article I mentioned above.
Earlier I shared a post about designing context management, and wanted to add an example I’d seen. I knew I’d made this screenshot, but then couldn’t remember where; luckily I found it today hiding in a folder.
This little widget from Plaxo is the only example I’ve noticed where an online platform allows you to view information from different contextual points of view (other than very simple examples like “your public profile” and “preview before publish”).
Plaxo’s function actually allows you to see what you’re sharing with various categories of users with a basic drop-down menu. It’s not rocket science, but it goes miles further than most platforms for this kind of functionality.
If anybody knows of others, let me know?
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