Satellite Lamps is a project about making one of today’s most important infrastructures visible: GPS, the Global Positioning System. Made with Einar Sneve Martinussen and Jørn Knutsen as part of the Yourban research project at AHO, it carries on the work we started in 2009, revealing the materials of technologies like RFID and WiFi.

GPS is everywhere, but it’s invisible. Very few of us have any sense of how it actually works, or how it fills the spaces we move through. We wanted to explore the cultural and material reality of GPS, and to understand it through design.

“Satellite Lamps shows that GPS is not a seamless blanket of efficient positioning technology; it is a negotiation between radio waves, earth-orbit geometry and the urban environment. GPS is a truly impressive technology, but it also has inherent seams and edges.”

We built a series of lamps that change brightness according to the accuracy of the GPS signals they receive. Photographed as timelapse films, they start to show how these signals behave in actual urban spaces.

The project is documented in an extensive article that sets out how it was made and why. You can read more about how we explored GPS technology, how the visualisations were made, and about the popular cultural history of GPS.

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My PhD thesis, ‘Making Visible’, was submitted in December 2013 and successfully defended on 12 June 2014. It reflects on the material-exploration research from the Touch and Yourban projects, and uses those explorations to place design research with technology as a cultural, material and mediational practice:

In Making Visible I outline how interaction design may engage in the material and mediation of new interface technologies. Drawing upon a design project called Touch, that investigated an emerging interface technology called Radio Frequency Identification or RFID, I show how interaction design research can explore technology through material and mediational approaches. I demonstrate and analyse how this research addresses the inter-related issues of invisibility, seamlessness and materiality that have become central issues in the design of contemporary interfaces. These issues are analysed and developed through three intertwined approaches of research by design: 1. a socio- and techno-cultural approach to understanding emerging technologies, 2. through material exploration and 3. through communication and mediation. When taken together these approaches form a communicative mode of interaction design research that engages directly with the exploration, understanding and discussion of emerging interface technologies.

The thesis is built around four peer-reviewed journal articles, together with a ‘meta-reflection’ document that sets them in a wider frame of theory, concepts and models.

Overview

The meta-reflection develops the concept of mediational material, which draws attention to the material and communicative practices in interaction design. These practices are what we use to explore, develop and share knowledge about technologies as design materials.

I’ve made it available in a few digital formats:

• Download as PDF (7MB)
• Download as ePub (14.4MB)
• Read it on Kindle (US, UK)

It’s also available through AHO’s open-access archive ADORA.

Articles

The four included articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Article 1: Exploring ‘immaterials’: mediating design’s invisible materials

This article takes on the idea of ‘immaterial’ and ‘seamless’ technologies, asking how designers might explore them as design materials. It situates interaction design as a sociocultural practice, one engaged with culture, critical approaches and the technocultural imagination. It closes by looking at mediational strategies (documentary film, online video, weblog writing) and at how new material perspectives have been shared, discussed and developed by others.

Arnall, T. (in press). ‘Exploring ‘immaterials’: mediating design’s invisible materials’. International Journal of Design, 29. Will be available at the International Journal of Design.

Article 2: Visualizations of digital interaction in daily life

This article explores how visual signage can make aspects of ubiquitous computing technologies visible, and how digital tools and platforms shape that visual design. It looks at identification technologies like barcodes and RFID, which only become ‘visible’ or ‘interactional’ through a designer’s work on physical or visual expression. It argues that designers should work carefully at the bindings and distinctions between design process, visual mediation, and the symbols and signs that surround them, when engaging with emerging technologies as material for creative and communicative composition.

Morrison, A., & Arnall, T. (2011). Visualizations of Digital Interaction in Daily Life. Computers and Composition, 28(3), 224-234. Available at Computers and Composition.

Article 3: Satellite Lamps

Satellite Lamps is a project about using design to investigate and reveal one of the fundamental constructs of the networked city: GPS, the Global Positioning System. The article extends the concept of ‘mediational materials’ to how GPS technology inhabits urban spaces. It takes up how a discursive, reflexive interaction design practice can open up new perspectives on networked city life. Satellite Lamps is also a multimediational web text, moving between film, notebooks and a host of images, so that the richness of the work can surface in ways that traditional academic publishing couldn’t support.

Martinussen, E, Knutsen, J & Arnall, T. (forthcoming 2014). Satellite Lamps. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Will be available at Kairos.

Article 4: Depth of Field: Discursive design research through film

This article is about the role of film in interaction and product design research, and the use of film to explore and explain emerging technologies across multiple contexts. It closes by looking toward the potential of a discursive design practice, where the object of design and analysis is the discourse catalysed by new artefacts, and where design research puts communication at its centre.

Arnall, T., & Martinussen, E. S. (2010). Depth of field: discursive design research through film. FORMakademisk, 3(1). Available at FORMakademisk.

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Internet machine is a multi-screen film about the invisible infrastructures of the internet. I made it to show the physical reality of our data: the rooms, racks and machines through which ‘the cloud’ is transmitted and transformed.

Internet machine (showing now at Big Bang Data, or watch the trailer) documents one of the largest, most secure and ‘fault-tolerant’ data centres in the world, run by Telefónica in Alcalá, Spain. I shot these hidden architectures with a wide, slow-moving camera. The small changes of perspective let you sit with these spaces, think about them, feel their strangeness.

I wanted to look beyond the childish myth of ‘the cloud’, and ask what the infrastructures of the internet actually look like. It felt important to see and hear the energy that goes into powering these machines, and the associated systems that secure, cool and maintain them.

Past layers of identification and security far higher than any airport, you find yourself in deafeningly noisy rooms, racks of servers and routers cocooned inside them. Hot and cold air blusters through everything.

Server rooms stay cool thanks to quiet, airy ‘plenary’ corridors that divide up the space. Fibre-optic connections run through multiple, redundant paths across the building. Down in the labyrinthine basement, the cables meet the wider internet through holes in rough concrete walls.

Power comes through the mains, and is backed up by warm caverns of lead batteries, managed by gently buzzing cabinets of relays and switches.

Those, in turn, are backed up by rows of yellow generators, with diesel storage tanks and contracts with fuel supply companies so that the building can run indefinitely until power returns.

Outside, the building’s facade is a series of enormous stainless-steel water tanks, holding tens of thousands of litres of cool water, sitting there in case of fire.

Up on the roof, to the sound of birdsong, a football-pitch-sized array of shiny aluminium ‘chillers’ filters and cools the air going into the building.

Seeing these machines at work, you start to feel the internet as a place. Heavy, architectural, material. A physical system with a very specific shape.

Production

This was an exciting project, a chance for an ambitious location shoot in a complex environment. Telefónica were remarkably accommodating, and let us shoot across the entire building, including spaces well beyond the ‘spectacular’ server rooms. Thirty-two locations over two days, followed by five weeks of post-production.

I had to invent some new production methods to make a three-screen installation, building on techniques I developed over ten years ago. The film was shot with both video and stills, using a panoramic head and a Canon 5D mkIII. The video used the Magic Lantern RAW module on the 5D, while the RAW stills were processed in Lightroom and stitched together in Photoshop and Hugin.

I then converted the footage into 3D scenes using camera mapping, recreating the perspective by hand (a kind of low-tech, traditional photogrammetry). That let me animate a virtual three-camera rig inside the reconstructed space, and invent entirely new camera movements. The final installation plays out in 4K across three screens.

More photos on Flickr.

Internet machine is part of BIG BANG DATA, open from 9 May 2014 until 26 October 2014 at CCCB (Barcelona) and from February to May 2015 at Fundación Telefónica (Madrid).

Internet Machine is produced by Timo Arnall, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), and Fundación Telefónica. Thanks to José Luis de Vicente, Olga Subiros, Cira Pérez and María Paula Baylac.

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The Immaterials project is about the growing invisibility of the interfaces and infrastructures around us. Systems like WiFi and 3G shape how we experience the world. But we can barely see them, and most of us have little sense of what they are. As Adam Greenfield says:

the complex technologies the networked city relies upon to produce its effects remain distressingly opaque, even to those exposed to them on a daily basis. it’s hard to be appropriately critical and to make sound choices in a world where we don’t understand the objects around us.

James Bridle puts it more plainly:

Those who cannot perceive the network cannot act effectively within it, and are powerless.

I wanted to show the shape and workings of some of these infrastructures, through photography, animation, narrative and film. Over the last five years I’ve worked with Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen, Jack Schulze and Matt Jones toward a body of work that’s now brought together in an exhibition for the first time.

From 2004 to 2008 I was trying to understand how wireless interactions occupied physical space. That ran through my work on a Graphic language for touch, and through short films like Wireless in the world. Some of my students at the time made beautiful, fictional studies of what different kinds of radio might feel like.

Jack Schulze and I also made a short, playful film called Nearness about action at a distance. In it, a series of simple reactions are set off by immaterial phenomena: radio waves, mobile networks, light, magnetism, wind.

In 2006 we ran a Touch workshop with BERG. We kept coming up against how invisible RFID was, and how much that got in the way of designing with it. It struck us as strange: a technology defined as a ‘touch’ or proximity interface, with no apparent physical, spatial or gestural form you could get hold of. How do we, as designers, make these materials visible so we can have reflective conversations with them?

So we made Experiments in Field Drawing, a piece that literally drew the physical presence of RFID interactions. We took it further with photography, animation and light painting, in the film Immaterials: Ghost in the Field.

Matt Jones coined the term immaterials for the project, and gave a great talk about ways of understanding the immaterial parts of interaction design. Matt and I also looked at machine vision, another invisible phenomenon becoming a material for designers, in Robot Readable World.

In 2011, as part of a research project called Yourban at AHO, we extended the work to WiFi. Using the same light-painting techniques, we revealed the enormous scale and density of ad-hoc WiFi networks in urban spaces in Immaterials: Light Painting WiFi.

Over the last two years we’ve turned our attention to the Global Positioning System (GPS), central to both the vision and the reality of contemporary interfaces.

We’ve built a series of Satellite Lamps that sense the 24 GPS satellites in orbit. Each lamp changes brightness according to the strength of the signals it receives. Seeing them through a timelapse, you understand that GPS is messy and unpredictable, a negotiation between radio waves, earth-orbit geometry and the urban environment.

Satellite Lamps has so far been exhibited at Lighthouse and Dread. You can watch the film and read the extensive article that sets out our process, along with a cultural history of GPS.

The visual languages we’ve developed have ended up in advertising, on the BBC and Discovery Channel, and the techniques have been extended in research at MIT and CIID, and by many designers, enthusiasts and hackers. It’s exciting to see both the subject and the methods being taken up by so many other people. I’m looking forward to seeing more.

the truly pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening these occult systems up, demystifying them, explaining their implications to the people whose neighborhoods and choices and very lives are increasingly conditioned by them. — Adam Greenfield (2009)

Immaterials grew out of the small preoccupations of a few designers working with the invisible stuff in front of us. Those experiments led to bigger, more richly visual work. What I think we’ve ended up with is an approach to technology built around material exploration, explanation and communication. Images and language, alongside the materials themselves, shape how we understand technology. Immaterials has shown how we can use ‘design and playful explorations to shape or stir the popular imagination’.

The exhibitions

All the Immaterials projects are on display at Lighthouse in Brighton from 5 September until 13 October 2013.

Satellite Lamps and Robot Readable World are on display at Dread in Amsterdam from 7 September until 24 November 2013.

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‘The best design is invisible‘ is the interaction design phrase of the moment. The images above are from my ever-growing collection of quotes about how design and technology will ‘disappear‘, become ‘invisible‘, or how the ‘best interface is no interface‘.

The Verge has recently given both Oliver Reichenstein and Golden Krishna a platform to talk about this. It has spawned manifestos, films, talks, books, #NoUI hashtags and some debates about what it might mean. I’ll call this cluster of ideas ‘invisible design’.

I agree with some of what’s driving this movement. Design’s obsession with touchscreens really is a problem. I’ve spent the last eight years writing against glowing rectangles, studying our fascination with screens, and watching how that fascination has become a cultural phenomenon. In response I’ve been researching and inventing interfaces for pulling interaction out from under the glass.

I disagree with a lot of the rest, for reasons I’ll set out below.

1. Invisible design propagates the myth of immateriality

There’s already plenty of talk celebrating how invisible and seamless technology is, or should be. We’re overloaded with childish myths like ‘the cloud’, a soft, fuzzy metaphor for huge infrastructure projects of undersea cables and power-hungry data farms. These myths can be harmful, and are often just plain wrong. Networks go down, hard disks fail, sensors fail to sense, processors overheat, batteries die.

Computing systems are suffused through and through with the constraints of their materiality. – Jean-François Blanchette

Invisible design tells us technology will ‘disappear’ or ‘just get out of the way’. It glosses over the qualities of interfaces that make them difficult or delightful.

When we deliberately hide the seams of an interface, smoothing over the edges and transitions that every technical system has, we lose something. Designers lose a sense of what they’re working with. Users lose the ability to understand what’s happening. Without that understanding we fall back on folk-theories that make systems harder to use, and we lose the ground from which to criticise them.

As systems increasingly record our personal activity and data, invisibility is exactly the wrong model.

By removing our knowledge of the glue that holds the systems that make up the infrastructure together, it becomes much more difficult, if not impossible, to begin to understand how we are constructed as subjects, what types of systems are brought into place (legal, technical, social, etc.) and where the possibilities for transformation exist. – Matt Ratto (2007)

In other words, invisibility takes agency away from both users and designers.

2. Invisible design falls into the natural/intuitive trap

The movement tells us to ’embrace natural processes’ and praises the ‘incredibly intuitive’ Mercedes car interface. This language is a trap. (We should ban natural and intuitive, by the way.) It tells us nothing about how complex products actually become simple or familiar.

Invisible design leads us toward the horrors of Reality Clippy. Does my refrigerator light really go off? Why was my car unlocked this morning? How did my phone go silent all of a sudden? Without clear, readable systems for handling all this ‘smartness’, we’re going to get very lost and very frustrated. The tricky business of push notifications and the Facebook privacy train wreck are just the tip of the iceberg.

Take the Nest thermostat, which ‘learns’ your habits to control the home temperature. A good example of invisible learning. But the Nest has a highly visible interface that reassures you, tells you when it’s learning, and a large dial for adjusting temperature. Beautiful, legible microinteractions. A Nest without these visual and direct-manipulation interfaces would be useless, uncanny and frustrating. Nest wants UI.

Much of the discussion around invisible design points to sensors and tangible interfaces as the answer. But these systems aren’t any simpler or more familiar. They have their own material qualities, edges and ‘grain’ that still need to be understood and learnt. Their literal invisibility can cause confusion, even fear, and often makes things more unpredictable and more likely to fail.

In our work with interface technologies like RFID and computer vision, we’ve learnt that it takes a lot of work to understand the technologies as design materials. So it’s not useful to claim UI is ‘disappearing’ into sensing, algorithms and tangible interfaces, when we don’t fully understand them as UI yet.

3. Invisible design ignores interface culture

Interfaces are the dominant cultural form of our time. So much of contemporary life happens through interfaces, inside UI. They’re part of cultural expression and participation. Skeuomorphism is evidence that interfaces are more than chrome around content, more than tools for solving problems. To declare them ‘invisible’ is to deny them a cultural form, a medium. Would we say ‘the best TV is no TV’, ‘the best typography is no typography’, ‘the best buildings are no architecture’?

A lot of what we do at BERG is cultural invention, as much as it is problem-solving:

We’re not interested in this idea of the invisible technology in a modernist sense. Tech won’t be visible but only if it’s embedded into the culture that it exists within. By foregrounding the culture, you background the technology. It’s the difference between grinding your way through menus on an old Nokia, trying to do something very simple, and inhabiting the bright bouncy bubbly universe of iOS. The technology is there, of course, but it’s effectively invisible as the culture is foregrounded.” – Jack Schulze (in Domus 965 / January 2013)

We should be able to celebrate the fantastic explosion of diversity in UI while also developing a healthy critique of things like touch screens. But by calling for UI to disappear altogether in the name of efficiency, we stay stuck in the same utilitarian mindset that produces inert technological visions like this one. Interfaces are part of the cultural landscape. We should treat them that way.

4. Invisible design ignores design and technology history

The movement ignores at least thirty years of thinking in design and technology. A few examples.

Much of the recent invisible design discussion repeats the thinking in Jared Spool’s ‘Great Designs Should Be Experienced and Not Seen‘ and Donald Norman’s ‘Invisible Computer‘. A better reference point would be Norman’s earlier book, The Design of Everyday Things, where he talks about the ‘problems caused by inadequate attention to visibility’ and about supporting our mental models of systems. We need a lot more thinking about our mental models of algorithms in particular.

Adam Greenfield has investigated the social and ethical issues around the development of ubiquitous computing systems, and is particularly concerned by their disappearance:

“Ubiquitous systems must contain provisions for immediate and transparent querying of their ownership, use, and capabilities. Everyware must, in other words, be self-disclosing. Whether such disclosures are made graphically, or otherwise, they ensure that you are empowered to make informed decisions as to the level of exposure you wish to entertain.” – Adam Greenfield (2006)

Other designers have talked about the qualities they want from ubiquitous computing interfaces, such as polite, pertinent and pretty:

“The vast quantities of information that personal informatics generate need not only to be clear and understandable to create legibility and literacy in this new world, but I’d argue in this first wave also seductive, in order to encourage play, trial and adoption” Matt Jones & Tom Coates (2008)

Matthew Chalmers has, more than anyone else, uncovered the history of seamlessness. Seamlessness is ‘the deliberate “making invisible” of the variety of technical systems, artifacts, individuals and organizations that make up an information infrastructure. This work actively disguises the moments of transition and boundary crossing between these various parts in order to present a solid and seemingly coherent interface to users.’ (Ratto 2007). Although Mark Weiser is often cited as an advocate of seamless systems, Chalmers found otherwise:

Weiser describes seamlessness as a misleading or misguided concept. In his invited talks to UIST94 and USENIX95 he suggested that making things seamless amounts to making everything the same, reducing components, tools and systems to their ‘lowest common denominator’. He advocated seamful systems (with “beautiful seams”) as a goal. Around Xerox PARC, where many researchers worked on document tools, Weiser used an example of seamful integration of a paint tool and a text editor (Weiser, personal communication). He complained that seamless integration of such tools often meant that the user was forced to use only one of them. One tool would be chosen as primary and the others reduced and simplified to conform to it, or they would be crudely patched together with ugly seams. Seamfully integrated tools would maintain the unique characteristics of each tool, through transformations that retained their individual characteristics. This would let the user brush some characters with the paint tool in some artful way, then use the text editor to ‘search and replace’ some of the brushstroked characters, and then paint over the result with colour washes. Interaction would be seamless as the features of each tool were “literally visible, effectively invisible”. Seamful integration is hard, but the quality of interaction can be improved if we let each tool ‘be itself’. – Matthew Chalmers (2003)

Matt Ratto investigates the darker side of this drive toward invisibility, arguing that seamlessness encourages:

“a particular kind of passivity and lack of engagement between people and their actions and between people and their social and material environment” and that we must “critique the clean, orderly, and homogenous future that is at the heart of these modernist visions” – Matt Ratto (2007)

Anne Galloway suggests that it is in the seams where the design work can be done:

“Although seamlessness may remain a powerful and effective metaphor to guide particular projects, when it comes to actually getting the work done—and the challenges of having to do it with people who can be very different from each other—then I suggest it is in everyone’s best interests to recognise the importance of seams and scars in marking places where interventions can be made, or where potential can be found and acted upon.” – Anne Galloway (2007)

In interaction design we need to look at the long history of Durrell Bishop‘s work. He is one of the strongest advocates for self-evident design, whether physical or virtual, through his teaching and design practice. Durrell’s ‘Platform 12’ in the RCA Design Products course attempts to see design as:

“a celebration of a model for how things work, where once again we can treat function as beauty, instead of merely treating design as form and image.”

Durrell’s work on the Marble Answering Machine (1992) is a brilliant piece of self-evident design, and remains a touchstone for all interaction design work.

Designers also need to read the first four chapters of ‘Where the action is‘ by Paul Dourish, a clear-eyed account of how human abilities and computer interfaces have developed together over the last fifty or sixty years. Dourish shows interfaces becoming more social and more tangible. They’re becoming more present, not less.

And finally, from a design perspective, there is a long tradition of making complex products legible and understandable. Industrial designer Konstantin Grcic talks about the relationship between the technologies and the use of an object:

“A machine is beautiful when it’s legible, when its form describes how it works. It isn’t simply a matter of covering the technical components with an outer skin, but finding the correct balance between the architecture of the machine… and an expressive approach that is born out of the idea of interaction with those using the object.” – Konstantin Grcic (2007)

And perhaps more famously, Dieter Rams has always spoken of honesty and understanding in his product design practice. Making a product understandable is one of his Ten Principles of “Good Design”.

This drive for understanding needs to go further than physical form (as it has done at Apple) and start to inform the design of systems and UI.

Towards legible, evident interaction

We must abandon invisibility as a goal for interfaces. It’s misleading, unhelpful, dishonest. It leaves room for unusable, harmful and frustrating interfaces, and for systems that gradually erode users’ and designers’ agency. Invisibility might sound attractive at first, but it sidesteps the real, thorny, difficult work of designing and using complex systems.

We might be better off taking our language from typography. Talking about legibility and readability, while keeping room for the way typography can also call attention to itself in beautiful, spectacular ways. Our goal should be to ‘place as much control as possible in the hands of the end-user by making interfaces evident‘.

The interfaces we design may become normalised through use, effectively invisible over time. But that will only happen if we design them to be legible, readable, understandable, and to put culture in front of technology. It’s how you build trust and confidence in an interface in the first place, enough that it can comfortably recede into the background.

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Our film Immaterials: Light painting WiFi, made with Einar Sneve Martinussen and Jørn Knutsen as part of the Yourban project, is a finalist at the Vimeo Awards 2012.

The awards ceremony is on 7 June at 8PM in New York City. The Vimeo Festival also looks great.

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As machines and robots settle into the world alongside us, what can they register? What signals do they pick up from our streets, our cities, our media, from us? Computer vision captures a tiny fraction of what we see. Sometimes it echoes human perception. Often it doesn’t.

Read more about the film, and have a look at Matt Jones’ talk of the same title.

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I have written more about the exhibition and the works at the Touch and BERG weblogs. The exhibition has also been reviewed by CNN, the New York Times, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal amongst others.

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I make small, palatable videos, like commercials, for companies involved in tech, to figure out how to convey the essence of their products in concise, accessible ways.

I like to think that I’m able to do this because I think slowly enough to notice the exact points while using a product at which I respond with the most delight. And if I can reproduce those moments on-screen, without explicitly saying that they’re delightful, an audience will intuitively understand the delight they might feel themselves.

(From an interview in Business Insider.)

He’s good at surfacing the joy and pleasure in some of the smallest interactions, particularly evident in this ad for the Jambox by Jawbone.

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A truth that releases a waterfall of emotion. It is this energy that propels us through The Tree of Life. A voluptuous, bulging energy shaped and encouraged by sweeping camera movement, ultra wide lenses, lyrical blocking, the safe-harbor of Jessica Chastain’s face, and the vacillation in Hunter McCracken’s. These combine to create scenes that perfectly capture the rapturous feelings of childhood. Sensations evoked when light & dark entwine, and our instinctual knowledge that these things are the same.

And on how to approach the film:

A moment long enough for me to relax, and I was suddenly taken by a feeling of great tenderness and calm. I don’t completely understand why I felt this, but the inclusion of these CGI dinosaurs struck me as an particularly affectionate and loving decision. Terrence Malick believes in his audiences, and has faith that we also can believe. It’s the feeling of your mother brushing the hair off your forehead as she tells you a bedtime story. You protest because she’s changed a part of the usual tale, or it’s not the way you want it to be, but smiling, she says “Shhh shhh. Just listen.”

From the brilliant Kartina Richardson.

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