Exploring semantics
I think about language, definitions, taxonomies/folksonomies and semantics constantly and find an enormous amount of value for myself and others in doing so (as a friend at NASA recently wrote to me, “Sometimes…labeling something is just the spark that’s needed.”). This post is a bit of an “out-loud” personal exploration for a term that defines my approach to design.

Lately, I’ve been sifting through terminology debates over “interaction design” versus “user experience design” versus “human interface design”. There’s, 52 Weeks of UX’s “Is the term “UX” being marginalized?” post. There’s Dan Saffer’s thoughts on how the majority of designers don’t fill the full umbrella of what “user experience” covers and that the title interaction designer is more accurate (and IMHO, cooler sounding than UX) in most cases. There’s commentary around how thoughtful Apple is for using the label “human interface” instead of “user”. And don’t get me started on the term “service design” (I have quite a rant for why I don’t like it).

I find that all of these terms lack something for me. User experience, despite its great thinking around holistic ecosystems, does have the fatal flaw of the term “user”, which assumes a narrow technosocial delegation of roles between technologies and people. Putting “user” aside and just using the label Experience Designer sits awkwardly for me – it sounds like I’d be some sort of event curator, like a Wedding Planner. Interaction design is precise, and as a result can be seen as pertaining to a fairly narrow set of tasks. Human interface design’s “pro’s” are also what I would consider to be its “con’s” – focusing on humans as the end-all entity to design for, leaving behind machines, data and systems as things that will only ever need to directly interact with humans. Designing with only humans in mind creates major gaps in knowledge about how technology works and why (perhaps why Apple chooses to use the word “magic”?).

Thus far with my work, I’ve used the term digital anthropologist – someone who studies interaction between humans and digital ecosystems. I still find this title to be accurate, however, anthropology, I would argue, sometimes suffers from not being perceived as an applied science, mostly remaining contained to academia. On the “applied” end of my work, my approach and aim with design focuses around the systematic integration of man, devices, data, and the systems that living/non-living objects operate within. The term Human-Computer Interaction starts to get at the heart of it, but using the term “computer” still feels a little narrow.

Zeroing in on the term cybernetics
Through my exploration so far, I have begun zeroing in on the term Cybernetics as one that closely defines what I aspire to do in my design work. Cybernetics gets more at the science of interaction between things and how they connect to create an overall system (or “experience”). It also seems like a good fit with my active interest and work with the science community.

The dictionary definition of Cybernetics is “the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things”. There’s a whole world of design that exists outside of focusing only on humans. Thinking about how objects and data interact, how they work at the level of a crystal oscillator, and how they can be given the ability to communicate outside of their own technological species. I’m fascinated by this world similar to how I’m fascinated with space exploration – it’s why I’ve been learning the basics of Python and Arduino in my spare time, it’s why I typically surround myself with developers. Putting cybernetics under the microscope further:

From those that coined the term, “a cyborg, or “cybernetic organism”, was initially defined as follows: “The Cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulating control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.” This verbose sentence can be simplified to, the cyborg represents “a notion of human-machine merging”".

Many people when they first hear the term cybernetics, they think of it pertaining mostly to the overtly physical; machines being embedded in our skin, wired to our nervous system. But, cybernetics can also pertain to being something that is mental, requires physical interaction (as opposed to embedded), and/or is based in how a system of things work together. As Andy Clark, a cognitive scientist, pointed out, “we shall be cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts”. When you consider the definition further, it’s something that is completely ubiquitous to us now. As my friend Amber Case, a cyborg anthropologist, often points out, cybernetic organisms are not the dystopian future from Star Trek – we are already cyborgs. We sit inside exoskeletons on highways that allow us to travel at super fast speeds, we create what can be considered to be technosocial wormholes when we make a phone call, etc.

“Cybernetics … has evolved from a “constructivist” view of the world [von Glasersfeld 1987] where objectivity derives from shared agreement about meaning, and where information (or intelligence for that matter) is an attribute of an interaction rather than a commodity stored in a computer [Winograd & Flores 1986].”

So what does being a designer with a focus on cybernetics mean?
To me, it’s an aspiration of thinking about and finding balances within augmented human experiences, the potential of assimilated technology and science in living and non-living organisms, social interactions, and systems on both intimate and astronomically large scales. I think Tom Igoe’s Making Things Talk is in my direct line-of-sight on some of this.

So, a simplified example is, if a “non-cybernetic design approach” results in a large touch-screen interface of data (or as Mike Kuniavsky would refer to it, a “terminal”) within a museum exhibit, a cybernetic approach might result in a networked experience like the London Science Museum’s The Science of Spying exhibit. As you explore the exhibit, a magnetic ID card tracks your performance data within a system of interactive installations (or individual “machines”), porting the data to a “meta machine” of unified information. Various ID touch points are scattered throughout to guide you through the exhibit. A couple of people’s work that begins to intersect on a similar level is Adam Greenfield’s thinking around urban systems design and Jane McGonigal’s reality-based gaming.

At this point, I’m still struggling with the exact words that sit well within the larger umbrella of system/community strategy and design for living and non-living organisms. Cybernetic interaction designer? Cybernetic UX designer? Cybernetics designer? Cybernetic experience designer? I’m curious of your thoughts.

Right now, I’m using Cybernetic UX Designer, including UX almost as an outward beacon to a community of searchers – something which Whitney Hess sums up nicely: “At best, [UX is] a common awareness, a thread that ties together people from different disciplines who care about good design, and who realize that today’s increasingly complex design challenges require the synthesis of different varieties of design expertise.”

In my discussions with Amber on my thoughts, she somehow implanted a chip in my brain and summed it up in a way that tickles the space geek in me:

“The idea is that spacesuits fit people for space travel, to become accustomed to external hostile environments. In the same way, a Cybernetic UX designer is designing interfaces for people to handle environments full of intense amounts of data radiation, etc., so that a user might be able to survive their trip through the Internet and arrive at their final destination. A well-designed interface protects people from the hostile environment of raw, complex data. It helps them to breathe as they go about their work.”

Ariel Waldman: Space Hacks from Ariel Waldman on Vimeo.

This video is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.

Conference: Linux Australia 2010 (linux.conf.au) in Wellington, New Zealand

Speaker: Ariel Waldman

More and more people are reaching the edge of space with weather balloon payloads to the point that that NBC Nightly News just aired a segment on the space hacking trend. I’m incredibly excited to see this getting mainstream coverage – Spacehack.org is a pico project of mine very close to my heart and I spoke at a Linux conference in New Zealand just a few weeks ago on the different ways to be a space hacker. Hackerspaces around the world are getting in on the trend as well – just this year a competition called Hackerspaces In Space was announced to have a head-to-head battle of balloons.

So what do these projects consist of? Each one varies on what it uses, but it’s usually:

weather balloon + helium + payload (the camera, circuit board, batteries, gps abilities, etc.) + styrofoam bus/box to encapsulate the payload

(photo via John Gordon)

This weekend, I will be joining my local hackerspace Noisebridge to launch a Spacedroid! Spacedroid is similar to the Spaceduino launched by MIT and various arduino fans, but this will be using an Android payload instead of an arduino. The Spacedroid project is actually what inspired a group of us at Noisebridge to form a separate space geek group called Spacebridge.

Joining your local hackerspace as a way to make science open was a topic mentioned at my Open Science panel at SXSW this month (my great fellow panelists included Tantek Çelik, Dr. Kiki Sanford, Jessy Cowan-Sharp, and Natalie Villalobos). We received a lot of positive feedback and summaries from those who attended the talk and even inspired Jeremy Keith to start a Science Hack Day in London!

The thing I am most ecstatic about with all of this new activity is to see people in the technology and science industries collaborating together. It sounds like such a logical fit, but in practice, the two industries seem to keep to themselves. So, watching collaboration finally take place between two industries that have always had a crush on each other is quite delightful. Even further, it means that the “love child” (aka result) that they create together is making science open to people of all backgrounds/industries by lowering the barrier to entry for everyone.

(tumbled, tweeted and flickred already, reposting here since this is in fact my main URL)

Contributed a chapter to State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards

Available at: www.amazon.com/State-eUnion-Government-2-0-Onwards/dp/144… or electronic version and more in stock at: www.authorhouse.com/Bookstore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=65460

Other contributors include Lawrence Lessig, Tim O’Reilly, etc: 21gov.net/about/press-release-18-november/

Continuing my coverage of Supernova 2009 (see Changing Networks, Workplaces and the World), a “forum to examine all of the opportunities and challenges created in the Network Age”, I further dive into my notes/musings from days 2 and 3:

Going with the Flow (Real Time Flow Track with track chair Tantek Çelik)
(Tim O’Reilly, Dick Costolo, Brett Slatkin, Monica Keller)

Real-time information is becoming capillary, but the way in which it’s provided is under great debate. The relationship between real-time information flow and  technology/business decisions can greatly affect how we consume it. Tim O’Reilly raised questions of how the relationship will converge: “king of the hill or interoperable?”.

Brett argued that the debate has nothing to do with business needs – standards reduce costs. “I can write something once and change my provider at any time … [it] has to do with how hard it is to interoperate”. As most point out, a lot of the success of email came from its interoperability.

Dick Costolo from Twitter discussed how they’re spending a lot of time on APIs – making them better and more accessible. He spoke about current debates on if decentralization possible (at this point Blaine Cook, one of the original architects who no longer works at Twitter, spoke up from the audience: “Is it possible!? I built it!”).

But if you as a provider open everything up, do you then lose your competitive edge? For instance, Tim Berners-Lee compared to Google: Tim created the opportunity (the web) but didn’t capture much of it. The panel explained that if you interoperate, the competition can focus on more interesting things and building them better. Tim O’Reilly chimed in, “companies who used to be “content bullies”, like IBM and Microsoft, are now saying they like open source stuff because they now have the short end of the stick”. Blaine Cook spoke up again and shared what Fred Wilson, an early Twitter investor, told him about being open: “You’ll have a smaller piece of the pie, but the pie will be larger”.

Life in the 21st Century
(Esther Dyson, Bernardo Huberman, Linda Stone)

How is technology going to change us? Esther Dyson introduced the panel around this topic. Linda Stone discussed her latest endeavors in creating what she calls “zeitgeist mapping”. Her work in continuous partial attention inspired her to start looking at 20-year social trends as a way of providing clues to other social shifts. By looking into what products were being created and selling well, she plotted them to look for “shifts in dominant mass consciousness attention paradigm”. She argued that her data showed 1985-2005 was all about social networks and as an extreme of being “highly connected” 2005-present is all about security, trust and quality of life due to being overwhelmed and unfulfilled. I personally disagreed with this analysis  – while Linda’s data may be accurate, the analysis to me seemed to be making huge leaps of assumptions that weren’t explained incrementally (though, it should be noted this was a short top-level talk rather than an in-depth walk-through). Another point I disagreed with was how “Twitter started primarily as noise and it is increasingly signal”. I believe it would be more accurate to convey that Twitter primarily has remained the same, but the number of people realizing the value (signal) in it has grown exponentially through word of mouth and storytelling.

The panel continued on to discuss concepts about how technology is accelerating faster than humans can. Though, again, I’d argue that a lot of these concepts are more about cultural acceptance of technology and connected-behaviors as opposed to needing to “re-wire” our brains.

The rest of the presentation talked a lot about attention and attention as a currency. “Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit – attention also defines a culture or a community,” said the panelists. Unfortunately, I have to agree with Peter Merholz’ tweet from the session: “We’ve been talking “attention economy” since 2001. let’s move the conversation forward here. #sn09″

Frontiers of Real Time Collaboration
(David Weinberger, Jason Shellen, Paul Lippe, Laura Fitton, Deborah Schultz, Anna-Christina Douglas)

This was an interesting session to attend, as there seemed to be a lot of people in the audience who were passionate to hear what these people had to say about real-time collaboration. I believe the panelists wanted to discuss collaboration as well, but oddly the talk veered way off course – spending the majority of the time talking about Twitter. After Twitter was discussed for several minutes, the talk continued to simply discuss tools (like Google Wave) but spent no time discussing collaboration or concrete examples of how real-time tools can produce successful collaboration. At the tail end of the talk, I raised my hand and said that they had focused a lot on the tools but not anything on collaboration and asked how these tools are helping people overcome current challenges they face in trying to collaborate. I didn’t receive much of an answer, but after the session, I received apologies from the panelists and thank you’s from audience members who felt my same slight frustration. While the panel got off course, it was valuable to me to see how many people cared about discussing the subject. I have a deep personal interest in this area, which is why I organized an upcoming panel for SXSW 2010 called Open Collaboration Between Scientists, Communities and the Unknown. I very much am looking forward to discussing issues/successes around open collaboration more!

Attendee Roundtables
(Brad Templeton, Crystal Y.)

These were quick rapid-fire 10 minute talks on a wide range of subjects from Supernova attendees. I don’t have much other than a link and a couple insights to share from it:

Brad Templeton from the EFF talked about robo-cars: http://robocars.net

Crystal Y. (a high school student) shared some insights on her experiences with online communities. She explained that it’s annoying to be private on social networks because then you don’t allow people with similar interests to be able to connect with you. She also talked about how kids don’t focus on “being careful about what you say online” (a common characterization adults place on today’s children) – that actually they focus on “talking about what they stand for online to represent them” (a more positive outlook that aligns with a lot of danah boyd’s research). One of the insightful quotes I most enjoyed from Crystal was “Whenever I read articles that say “teens don’t use Twitter” it really annoys me”.