We’re the commons
Have any economists modeled the consuming public/workforce as a public good?
It seems to me that corporations are playing a game-theoretic game in which they individually want to pay less money and employ fewer people while simultaneously hoping other corporations will keep employing people and paying them enough to maintain a customer base for their product. In other words, a social contract.
What we're seeing now is the result of too many corporations defecting over the past 30 years. A tragedy of the commons, where we're the commons.
The flip side of this chain reaction, of course, is that consumers demand lower and lower prices because they can't afford what they used to. In order to compete, companies are forced to send manufacturing jobs to countries where labor costs are lower, so even more people can't afford what they used to.
How do we stop it?
On Architects and Mediated Architects
There seems to have been a recent uptick in the amount of discussion about the relationship between traditional architecture and information architecture, specifically in what the two fields have to learn from each other, both as practice and theoretical discourse. (The basics are laid out in Brett Ingram's piece in the November+December 2009 issue of interactions.)
The latter came to my attention first, when I was exposed to — and impressed by — the extent to which architecture (at least within the ivory tower) rests on solid philosophical grounding, whereas IA seems almost purely practice. Where, I wondered, are these conversations happening in the Information world. Of course, architecture has a few thousand years on IA as a discipline, but interaction design philosophy is starting to happen.
After taking a class with Malcolm McCullough, a champion of the architecture–interaction design relationship, and attending a bunch of the UM Taubman College’s Future of (Design|Urbanism|Technology|History) conference series, it became clear to me that architecture is looking to interaction design, user experience design, and information architecture for inspiration, particularly with regard to ethnographic methodologies, user-centered design, and technology. But, at least from my vantage point, there seems to be relatively little flowing the other direction.
I’m not the only one who has noticed this void in information discourse. IA Dan Klyn has been wondering something similar, and doing something about it, at least by writing and spurring conversation. The discussion that ensued in response to the above-linked post on the architecture forum Archinect is an interesting, if somewhat semantic, discussion of who and what is an architect.
So in a display of bad academic form (but hey, this is a blog…), I’m going to not track down original sources and just trust Archinect user namhenderson, who reports that IA Jesse James Garret posits that the act of user experience design is not medium specific; interaction designers and architects simply use different materials. (Based on the discussion at Archinect, I’d love to see some more discussion of what an IA’s materials are and how the separation of IA from UI widget design and visual design impacts this and the process.)
I’m going to take it one small step further: traditional architects are Architects, and information architects (and user experience designers) are Mediated Architects. And as Malcolm will tell you, buildings are becoming (thanks to technology) or are being recognized as (thanks to environmental awareness) information mediators in and of themselves, a trend that will likely blur the line that currently distinguishes the design of unmediated physical experiences from the design of purely digitally mediated ones.
Still, this seems to be a realization that is being more readily acknowledged in the academic worlds of traditional architecture and ubicomp than in the practice of architecture or information architecture. Hopefully, that’s only because embedded and building-scale digital technologies are relatively new, so neither practice has much experience working with these new materials, materials that can, and must, belong simultaneously to Architects and Mediated Architects.
A return to girltalk?
Several friends-who-are-girls of mine have recently starting talking on Twitter about listing (the closest one can get to "friending") each other on the online dating site OkCupid. This struck me as odd, especially as a guy, but a bit of further consideration has led me to this hypothesis:
As close ties have become weaker and fewer [1] [2] and the concept of friendship more explicitly and publicly articulated [3], I can't help but wonder if opportunities for "girl talk" have become fewer. Girls listing their real-life girlfriends on OkCupid provides a way to articulate those ties and provide a social object [4] (the profile) around which to engage in conversation about boys and dating in general.
As not-a-girl, I can't speak first hand to any of this, so comments/discussion are welcome.
- Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone. 2001 [↩]
- Akst, Daniel. America: Land of Loners?". In The Wilson Quarterly. Summer 2010 [↩]
- Larsen, M.C. Understanding Social Networking : On Young People’s Construction and Co-construction of Identity Online. 2007. [↩]
- Engeström, Jyri. Bookmarks, Babies, Barack... and other social objects. 2008. [↩]
You're majoring in control surfaces‽
First things first: yes, that is an interrobang.
Last week I worked tech for a student-produced (MUSKET) musical, Kiss of the Spider Woman — quite a good show, I might add — at the Power Center. It was really great to be back in theatre, and especially great to be back behind a board. The fact that, as a sound guy, it was the "wrong" board, the light board, was irrelevant; it was a lot of fun.
With just a few quick stints in between, it was really the first time I'd done any theatre tech work since high school, and this time I looked at everything with a very different eye: the eye of an HCI student.
Trying to explain what studying "information" means to the uninitiated has always proved challenging, and explaining it to my fellow theatre techs was no different. What I ended up saying that I study user interface design. Overhearing this from across the empty auditorium, one of the lighting guys made an obvious, but not-so-obvious, jump, shouting, "You're majoring in control surfaces‽"
"Well," I thought, "from his perspective, yes." So much of what we study in school is limited to on-screen interactions, be they in traditional software, web applications, or mobile applications, that input devices have been relegated to a single day's worth of discussion in one class. This pushes more complex input devices, like control surfaces, way out into the periphery. But there it was: I'm majoring in control surfaces. Brilliant.
This realization got me started thinking about the control surface with which I am most familiar: the analog mixing console. This is truly an elegant device, with one channel strip for each input channel, and each channel strip laid out as the signal flows: preamp gain at the top, then processing, routing, and finally level. These are then mixed together and sent to the outputs.
Then along came digital. Sure, they can have a much higher input density, and the power to run dozens of mixes from one board is very cool, but it comes at a significant cost to usability. Wikipedia agrees:
Analog consoles remain popular due to their continuing to have one knob, fader or button per function, a reassuring feature for the user. This takes up more physical space but allows more rapid response to changing performance conditions. Most digital mixers take advantage of the technology to reduce the physical space requirements of their product, entailing compromises in user interface such as a single shared channel adjustment area that is selectable for only one channel at a time. Additionally, most digital mixers have virtual pages or layers which change the fader banks into separate controls for additional inputs or for adjusting equalization or aux send levels. This layering can be confusing for operators.
The reason, I believe, for many of these usability problems is that much as computers rely on a nested-folder analogy to manage files and have only recently begun to take advantage of their digital nature by using tags (think Gmail's Labels), digital mixing consoles are using the analog mixing console as an analogy for digital signals.
This point was really driven home when the lighting designer explained to me that the market leader in moving light consoles has been uncontested for ten years because its designers gave serious thought to what makes moving lights different from conventional lights, and what designers and operators need to do to accomplish their goals; in other words, user-centered design.
I don't know what the answer is, but I believe that some fundamentally different way of handling large volumes (pun intended) of audio channels in a reasonably sized board is lurking just out of reach.
Announcing Grammar Fail(ure) — grammarfail.com
In the wake of Monday's horrible "grammar fail" sighting, I am pleased to announce Grammar Fail(ure), based on the social CMS Pligg!
Post your sightings, vote up new contributions, and discuss grammatical errors.
What to do about the automakers
Apparently there's a limit on how many characters can be in a reply to a posted item on Facebook, so I have to post this here.
I'm responding to a comment that was generally in agreement with Tom Friedman's column of 11 November 2008 about what to do about the automakers, but also frightened of the implications their failure will have on the economy, especially here in southeast Michigan:
I know, it's a tough one. I feel sorry for all the employees (and retirees) who are being screwed, but on the other hand, if the market isn't allowed to punish the shareholders (who will in turn punish the management), nothing will ever improve.
I also think that ultimately education is going to have to improved because there is no future for manufacturing in the US; Americans will do R&D, manufacturing will happen overseas. We just need more Americans capable of doing "brain work".
My brilliant plan (just thought up while typing this): the government acquires the assets of the automakers for pennies on the dollar and auctions them off to the highest bidder (i.e. Toyota, Honda, and defense contractors (the only manufacturing that should stay domestic)).
With the capital raised by the sale, put some into health care, but most of it should go into alternative energy research and training. The white-collar auto workers can be trained to do engineering, etc., and the blue-collar workers can handle the massive deployment of new energy technologies.
(While they're waiting for the research and engineering to happen, they can fix what President Elect Obama(!) has been calling our "crumbling infrastructure". The Eisenhower Interstate System was designed to last 50 years[citation needed]. Time's up.)
Stuff White People Do on Facebook
So, there's a blog called Stuff White People Like. It's very funny, and dead on in so many ways. I like it. (Does that make me white?)
I think someone should make a Facebook application that compares a user's profile to the list of stuff from the blog, then determines how white that person is.
I haven't given a ton of thought to how that comparison would work (n things in profile that white people like / m items in profile x 100 = % white?), but I think it'd be amusing.