The european network for people-centered design of interactive technologies

Interview: Adam Greenfield.

Convivio’s interviews feature leading voices from the multi-disciplinary field of Human-Centered Design.

This time we caught up with critical futurist Adam Greenfield.
Adam is the principal of New York-based Studies & Observations, and author of “Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing“, a must-read book about the rise of ambient informatics.

Adam Greenfield, Everyware.

Hello Adam, thanks for taking time off your busy schedule to participate to this interview.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you would describe your current interest in Human-Centered Design disciplines?

It’s my pleasure! I’m delighted to have the opportunity to talk with you today.

You know, I’m never quite sure how to answer questions about myself, because I have a riotously uneven background, and most of it’s not all that interesting to anyone who doesn’t know me. But I can certainly tell you how my current interest in thinking about the relationship between people and the ubiquitous informatics they’re exposed to got started.

Sometime in early 2002 I was sitting at my desk in Tokyo - at the time, I was the head of the information architecture department for Razorfish there - and I realized that my heart simply wasn’t in cranking out yet another enterprise-scale Web site.

I had already worked on so many, and the challenges were always the same. The same battles had to be fought with every new client engagement, and it had just about exhausted whatever reservoirs of energy or inspiration I had to devote to my job. On top of that ordinary ennui, I was suffering to some degree from an acute, post-September 11th crisis of relevance: “Does my work really matter to anyone? Do I make a difference in any meaningful way?”

I wanted to do something decisive, something that would contribute to people’s sense of self-empowerment and engagement with the world. And if I was going to be at all honest with myself, there was no way that the kind of work I was doing on the Web was going to satisfy these ambitions.

At the same time, it was becoming clear to me that information technologies were well-along in the process of colonizing everyday life. Even after the dot.com crash, you didn’t have to be any kind of a visionary to see the eventual convergence of Web services and mobile phones and “smart” environments. So I began poking around, asking my friends and colleagues what they saw coming over the horizon technologically, how they thought it would be presented to users, what kinds of design interventions would be required.

A great many of my friends pointed me at mobile development - this was Tokyo, of course, to begin with, and most of my non-Japanese friends there were Europeans. So it was entirely natural that they’d think of the mobile phone as a platform for this sort of activity. But, you know, I’m an American, and I’ll confess that I’ve never been really big on mobiles; they’ve always been sort of an afterthought to me.

By contrast, though, my friend Anne Galloway told me about a conference that was going to be held in Sweden in a few months’ time, a conference dedicated to an entire field I’d never heard of: ” Ubiquitous Computing“,” or “Ubicomp.” It sounded fascinating, and as I began to do more research on the field I realized that this was exactly what I had been looking for.

The potential range of situations and scenarios implicated in Ubicomp was tremendous, with deployments being proposed at the broadest possible scale. At the same time, though - as I knew all too well from my work on the Web - the user’s experience of informatic systems is frequently wretched. And the enormous dissonance between the total ambition of some of the systems being proposed and the actual quality of life they’d be likely to engender seemed like a very natural and very productive place for me to devote my efforts.

Could you briefly explain the core concepts behind “Everyware”?
How do they differ, if at all, from more widespread notions of Ubiquitous Computing?

“Everyware” is an umbrella term that I’ve introduced precisely because the term “Ubiquitous Computing” is problematic, in a few different ways.

It’s contentious, for starters: it’s strongly and properly identified with Mark Weiser and his work at Xerox PARC, and may not adequately describe the work of other people and institutions. It apparently refers - in educational circles, at least - also to ideas around using laptops in the classroom and so forth, and is understood in this context at least often enough to confuse some of the people I first turned to when I started to research my book.

And above all, it’s a mouthful. I couldn’t imagine it being used by the very people who would be most affected by this class of technologies - the ordinary, nonspecialist people, the people without any particular interest in informatics or user interfaces.

So “Everyware” is just a term that supposed to capture the important aspect of what’s going on when information processing is everywhere around us, and do so in such a way so as to be understood and comfortably used by the people around you on the subway or in the grocery store.

How does the term Everyware relate to other ones recently coined to describe apparently similar concepts, such as Bruce Sterling’s “Spime” or Julian Bleecker’s “Blogject“?
Are these terms actually fighting for the same meme-space or do you see them as complementary?

I think they refer to things at different levels of abstraction.

As Bruce explains it, in principle a “Spime” is a self-identifying, networked object that has been endowed with the ability to locate itself in space and time. In a sense, a mobile phone is a protospime: when you query it, it can tell you where it is now, where it was the last time it connected to the cellular network.

And as I understand it, Julian’s “Blogject” is an object with highly similar properties, the primary difference being that by definition it publishes the data it generates to the Web - the Web as it already exists and as we use it today. If your mobile phone had a dedicated Web page on which it would automatically publish its location and use history, it’d be a Blogject. Perhaps, then, you’d use the word to describe a Spime with a public and globally-accessible record.

Both of these are instances or cases of Everyware, “information processing embedded in the objects and surfaces of everyday life,” that “gives rise to a regime of ambient informatics.”

The thing I appreciated most about your book is that it introduces an ethical dimension to the design of ambient informatics.
How do you realistically see those currently busy turning these visions into our future accept the responsibilities mentioned in your book?
Does history testify to the ability of humankind to wisely and responsibly choose the forces that will shape its future(s)?

Well, I’m genuinely and deeply grateful that you appreciate the discussion of it in the book, but I think it’s critical to point out that an ethical dimension has always been present in the design of informatic systems. A technical system - anything designed, for that matter - always encodes the designer’s valuations and beliefs about the world they live in, on some level, and those valuations very frequently wind up conditioning the experience of use. The Northern Californian originators of the PC, for example, very explicitly held decentralized access to information processing to be a fundamental good, and a main driver of their efforts.

I think the reason the discussion looks relatively novel in Everyware is simply that such valuations are almost invariably obscured in the design and marketing and discourse aroud informatic technology. And if this hasn’t much mattered so far, as informatic systems reach every further into everyday life, their structuration begins to have very real influence on the choices we’re offered. These arguments at the level of architecture, as Lawrence Lessig might put it, constrain use in a way that is going to be inaccessible to recourse not merely in real time, but, for the great preponderance of users, ever.

These issues are only occasionally raised by designers - though there are certainly splendid countervailing examples, from Bucky Fuller to Dunne and Raby - and they’re not something that engineers and developers tend to be at all comfortable talking about.
In 1947, Norbert Wiener, the so-called “father of cybernetics,” confessed as much. This is what he said:

“Those of us who have contributed to the new science of cybernetics thus stand in a moral position which is, to say the least, not very comfortable. We have contributed to the initiation of a new science which…embraces technical developments with great possibilities for good and for evil. We can only hand it into the world that exists about us, and this is the world of Belsen and Hiroshima. We do not even have the choice of suppressing these technical developments. They belong to the age. […] The best we can do is to see that a large public understands the trend and the bearing of the present work, and to confine our personal efforts to those fields…most remote from war and exploitation.”

He also felt compelled to admit that he saw only “a very slight hope” that the systems he imagined and helped develop would be used wisely, and, to answer your question, I think history bears his skepticism out.

What gives me my own sense of slight hope is the idea - latent in Wiener’s comments about a “large public,” as well as in Mark Weiser’s call to “tell the world at large” that ubiquitous computing is “something dangerous” - that ordinary people can learn to recognize the trade-offs implicit in these systems, can demand that Everyware respond to their prerogatives, and can above all reject products and services that they do not recognize as doing so. But that’s a conversation that’s just getting started.

At the very beginning of your book you basically state that most, if not all, Everyware scenarios are based on the assumption that the current techno-fueled evolution of western societies is sustainable, but that you don’t necessarily think that is the case.
Could you elaborate a bit on this point?

Sure, I’m happy to - although I should say that my take on this isn’t particularly cheery.

At their root, across the board, all of the more elaborate visions of networked interactivity worked into the texture of everyday life make certain implicit assumptions about the context in which that life will be unfolding.

One of these assumptions is that society is going to go on more or less the way it is now, only more so: that we will continue to enjoy a relatively clement set of climatological circumstances, that energy will continue to be easily accessible and cheaply available, and that mobility and interconnectedness will continue to increase. And anyone paying attention has good reason to believe that this is an untenable assumption - that among other things, the atmosphere is now warmer than it’s been for the past few million years, that the overall salinity of ocean water is changing due to melting glaciers and ice caps, that worldwide we are running out of oil.

These are facts and observed measurements. They’re surely open to interpretation to some degree, but they’re not fundamentally open to question. And taken together they pose a considerable challenge to the idea that the status quo is going to kind of continue to unfold all placidly and uneventfully. So, as someone deeply interested in the human future, I have to reckon with the idea that there’s a nonzero chance that our civilization on this planet will be so profoundly disrupted by these developments and their consequences that any talk of a seamless, effortless everyday life built on a computational substrate is irrelevant fatuity. (In particular, I very strongly do not believe that some computational “singularity” or transcendence event is likely, and not only in the near future.)

I simply didn’t think it was responsible to release a book that in part concerned the near future without saying at least one or two words about what I thought some of the most likely outcomes were.

If nothing else, I was told last year (by someone in a position to know) that 10% of the planetary annual energy consumption is already devoted to powering computation. Already, with our current technology - all those servers and routers that we rely on to bring us the experience we recognize as the World Wide Web don’t turn out to run on good will and smiles after all.

Now imagine that even part of what the more enthusiastic advocates of computational ubiquity are imagining comes true, is deployed more or less as they would want it to be. Processing devices in every sweater, every doorknob and bicycle and kitchen sink, and all of them intercommunicating with each other. How long is that going to be sustainable, if it doubles or triples the energy requirement of the network infrastructure behind it all, and that in turn is ever harder and more expensive to maintain?

Along those lines certain visions of Everyware see objects part of the so-called “Internet of Things” becoming active contributors to conversations among human beings.
Could these objects thus play an active role in helping us better understand where we’re heading? Could they end up informing the very decisions we’ll have to make about them?

I think, among other things, that this was very much Bruce’s intention, in wanting to define a class of networked, self-describing, self-reporting objects. Certainly, if you read his book “Shaping Things“, you can’t escape the idea that the whole point of “spiming” objects is to help us do a better job of being aware of our energy and resource utilization footprint, and a better job of recycling them when their service lifetime is over.

Bruce Sterling. Shaping Things..

So, yes, absolutely I think it’s possible that our ideas about the world and where we stand in it will increasingly be shaped by the objects we share it with. I have to say, though, that I’m not as sanguine as Bruce is. Like Norbert Wiener, I think it’s more likely that in the absence of any strong constituency for more responsive design, networked objects will be used to track and understand us that we may be better marketed to and better policed, and otherwise either constrain the array of choices we have available, or offer us choices that are no choice at all. That’s why I think it’s so important that we understand what these technologies imply, and demand that their design respond to our needs.

Scenarios depicted in Everyware implicitly raise by several orders of magnitude the complexity of designing experiences for such interconnected contexts.
Will brand new tools and techniques be required or do you see the current ones evolving to face these new challenges?
Who do you see “naturally” stepping up to pick up those very challenges?

I’ve historically seen the community of user-experience practitioners as being best situated to respond to these new requirements, given the appropriateness of both the UX conceptual toolkit and the general orientation toward the needs of a human user. In particular, I saw it as a fairly natural fit for my former colleagues in information architecture, always having believed (and acted as if) information architecture was a discipline suited to the structural design of all kinds of human transactions with informatic systems, not merely Web sites.

I have to admit, though, that I’m not seeing the kind of widespread interest in the ubiquitous domain that would support such a belief.
Maybe it’s simply too early.

At the moment, what I can say is this: the successful design of humane and ethical everyware is - depending on the specific instantiation in question - going to call on so many discrete skills from across the fields of architecture, industrial design, interaction design, fashion, materials research and user ethnography that anyone with a specialty in these domains is going to have plenty to sink their teeth into.

In this sense then what would be a few “words of advice” for designers-at-large keen on getting their “hands dirty” with Everyware?

One part of me wants to say “start taking Korean lessons,” since that’s where so much of the enthusiasm for everyware is right now, in Korea and other parts of East Asia.

More seriously, I’d advise people to learn everything they can about RFID and about Near-Field Communication, and what possibilities these might bring to conventional objects or spaces - what might be enabled by adding NFC capabilities to a mobile phone, for example. This seems like it’s going to be one of the major lines along which the broader ubiquitous discourse will advance.

If that doesn’t turn you on, I’d imagine that getting comfortable with user observation and ethnography, contextual inquiry, and other techniques for the qualitative understanding of the experience of use will stand you in good stead. And if neither of these two suggestions appeal, about all I can say is sit just where you are - because it seems fairly likely to me that some kind of Everyware will come to you.

As someone who has read your book and throughly enjoyed it I can only agree with your last statement.
Thank you Adam for your time and insights.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 25th, 2006 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Ubiquitous Computing, Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Interview: Adam Greenfield.”

  1. In stereo! « Speedbird Says:
    November 30th, 2006 at 3:55 pm

    […] Two more-than-usually intelligent interviews with me are freshly up: Fabio Sergio’s, for the Convivio network, and Christina Ray’s for Rhizome. Both of ‘em made me think, and I hope you dig them as well. […]

  2. Urban Computing: the meta stuff » Blog Archive » About Adam Greenfield Says:
    January 21st, 2007 at 5:05 pm

    […] If you’re interested in still more, here are some interviews with me: - an excellent (and extended) conversation on the WELL; - by Rebecca Blood; - by Dan Saffer; - Two by Liz Danzico; - by Christina Ray; - by Fabio Sergio; - by Peter Bogaards of infodesign.org; - …and an old one. […]