Designed by Apple in California, assembled where?
While hanging out in Seattle with @amcvitte, @jgerrish, @lizblankenship, and @eaderhold, we decided on a whim to go see a one-man play called The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, created and performed by storyteller–turned–investigative-journalist Mike Daisey. I had no idea what to expect, but “powerful” would not have been one of my guesses. The content of the show is already dead-on, so there’s not really anything I can add, so I’ll just expand on a few of his key points.
The show interleaves stories from Apple’s history (Woz calls the Vatican, Jobs asks Scully if he wants to make sugar water or change the world, etc.), tales of life inside the RDF, a brief (and questionable, but that’s beside the point) history of HCI, and stories from Daisey’s trip to China to find out how, and by whom, all of the products we lust after are made. Needless to say, as an HCI guy, Apple fanboy, and anti-corporatist (don’t think too hard about that juxtaposition), I liked it.
But thinking too hard is exactly what Daisey wants us to do. How can I justify simultaneously being an admirer, owner, user, and shareholder of Apple and its products while opposing the corporatist system that created an environment in which 13-year-old girls work 12–15-hour days assembling products just like the very one I’m typing this on?
When Jobs and the Apple team saw the Xerox Star machine at PARC, in all its WIMPy glory, they recognized that the metaphor of computing had shifted. Daisey uses this metaphor as a metaphor (metametaphor?), saying that “if you control the metaphor, you control the way people see the world.” Well, the metaphor of “Made in China”–as–black-box is a dangerous one, and one that has to change.
We think that factories in China are highly automated, using machines to do the precision work required to put together an iPhone. The scary part is that this has become true in the collective mind of the West, but only because we like to ignore the humanity of the millions of workers who assemble these products, by hand, in Chinese factories — 435,000 of whom work for FoxConn, Apple’s primary assembly contractor — pretending that they are, in fact, machines. It’s like I said about the mythology of Ford in my previous post: the assembly line is about mechanizing and menializing human labor. And in China, people are cheaper than machines. This metaphor is what has to shift.
Mike Daisey makes the point that it’s not about the money, it’s about the mindset. I think he’s right. Here’s why:
He says that the total labor cost of an iPhone is 80¢. The number I found is $6.54 [1] [2], so I’ll use that. The theoretical hourly wage of a FoxConn worker is $1.22 [3]. Going with that for the sake of argument, that means it takes
to produce an iPhone. Now consider a US factory where a worker makes $20/hour. Even if it takes the same number of man-hours to produce an iPhone, which it wouldn’t because a US factory would be automated (with machines), the labor cost of producing an iPhone would increase to
A large percentage increase, yes, but it’s a product that costs upwards of $600. (Remember, the one you bought was subsidized by the carrier.) With a total materials cost of $172.46 [2], that means Apple would only make $320.33 per unit as opposed to $421.00 per unit.
Last quarter, Apple made $6 billion in profits [4]. Its market cap is currently almost twice that of Google, and 50% higher than Microsoft’s or IBM’s. In fact, the only two larger publicly traded companies in the world are PetroChina and Exxon Mobil [5]. As a proud AAPL shareholder, I understand that the raison d'être of a corporation is to make money, and that it isn’t a humanitarian organization. But I don’t want blood on my keyboard — or in my portfolio. Domestic manufacturing can go a long way toward that goal. (It can also increase quality and reduce the financial and environmental costs of shipping products around the world. Oh, and it could help bolster the US economy (remember, I'm a Detroiter) and create some great press.)
As Mike Daisey says, the crime isn’t exporting our jobs, it’s exporting our jobs without exporting our values. [6]
- http://puntodigital.com/iphone-labor-cost-is-6-54-dollars/224237/ [↩]
- http://www.ipodobserver.com/ipo/article/iphone_3gs_manufacturing_cost_at_179_per_unit/ [↩] [↩]
- http://www.examiner.com/technology-in-national/ipad-iphone-manufacturer-foxconn-to-raise-employee-wages-again [↩]
- 13 weeks ending 2011-03-26 [↩]
- As of 2010-12-31 [↩]
- http://mynorthwest.com/?nid=577&a=28888 [↩]
On the persistence of culture
A couple weeks ago, I was talking with my friend Ethan about how corporate cultures develop, and he pointed out the importance of origin mythology. For example, Microsoft’s origin story is of a shrewd Bill Gates buying DOS and rebranding it as a Microsoft product. Ever since then, Microsoft has had a culture of following and M&A rather than true innovation. Google, on the other hand, has been about enabling clever people, and giving them an environment in which to assert their cleverness.
How, then, can the Detroit car makers reinvent themselves with cultures that will help them to attract and retain talent? The Ford origin story is the mythology of the assembly line; in other words, of Ford’s ability to mechanize and menialize human labor. Is there a way for them to transform that into a culture that respects the value of individual workers, something demanded by today’s graduates?
Avatar: A disembodied cybernetic dreamscape
I just finished Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture. In it, he tells the story of how the communalist movement of the 1960s evolved into the technoutopian vision of the 1990s. It’s a compelling story, although it left me feeling distressed as I watched the characters tend toward a corporateist libertarianism as they “sold out”. (The pendulum swings yet again….)
But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I want to talk about Avatar. Yes, the movie with the blue people set on Pandora. The deep-seated appeal of this singular cultural artifact becomes clear when looked at in the historical context of the cybernetic- and LSD-influanced counterculture as well as, later, the digerati.
Two overarching concepts from the culture Turner describes permeate the movie. First is the cybernetic view of individuals — biological and otherwise — as nodes in a network, sensing, transmitting, receiving, and reacting to surrounding conditions in a giant feedback loop, just as the control sysem of an electromechanical device is, in the literal, electrical engineering sense of the word, a feedback loop. This, in an explicit way, is the very structure of Pandora’s biology, spiritualized by the native people, and romanticized by humans.
The second concept is disembodiment. Whether it was through electronic music (in the 1960s sense), strobe lights, and drugs, or later with networked computing and computer-mediated communication, 
Turner claims that many in the communalist-countercultre–turned-technoelite sought to leave the confines of the body for “an opportunity to feel a psychic union with others”. As a modern (or hypermodern, cyberpunk) interperatation of the word “avatar” would suggest, Avatar lets us imagine what it’d be like not only to become disembodied, only to reappear in a networked, interconnected virtual reality or cyberspace (whatever those words even mean anymore), but to actually leave one’s human body for a genuine alternative reality in which such connectedness is not only the norm, but real, meaningful, and organic.
But disembodiment is a non-ideal solution to the connectedness people seek. Because human biology 
lacks the networking hardware of Pandora’s life (c’mon, the pairing of a hunter with his bird is exactly like trying to pair with a Bluetooth device, complete with epic struggle), people use technology to escape their bodies and connect with others. But without that limitation, the protagonist of Avatar ultimately stops experiencing the cyberbiological world through technologically mediated disembodiment, and comes to fully embody that deep, network-like connection with all beings on Pandora.
Decision!
Over the past couple months, I've been agonizing over the most difficult decision it has ever been my pleasure to agonize over: which of several interesting, relevant, and fantastic Ph.D. programs that I was accepted to should I attend?
Well, thanks to an externally imposed deadline, I've made my decision. It wasn't easy (I had to "call in preoccupied" to work yesterday), but…whew.
This fall, I will begin studying in the Technology and Social Behavior program at Northwestern University. This is a young but unique program that offers a combined Ph.D. in Communication and Computer Science, and I'm excited to be a part of it!
The two kinds of privacy
It occurred to me yesterday while talking to some people at shul (after services, of course) that when people express concerns over privacy at Facebook and Google, there are really two types of privacy they’re talking about: privacy from individuals, and privacy from corporations.
Most people, it seems, are more concerned with privacy from individuals. Who can see my information? Friends? Bosses? Potential dates? Would-be stalkers? And what info can they see? Uncertainty (and occasionally surprise) about who can see what is what people like to call air-quotes “creepy”.
But this isn’t what bothers me so much. Although Facebook likes to keep us on our toes with ever-changing privacy settings (and defaults), we at least have some control over it. I could make my Twitter account private, could take my address and phone number off the web version of my résumé, could turn off my Facebook wall. That solves problem #1. (At least in the short term, until some 1337 hax0rz publish all of Facebook’s data on 4chan.)
No, what I find far more insidious is that so much of our data is being collected by companies in which incentive arrangements are set up not to favor the users of the product, but users of the enormous datasets that are being collected. As @librarythingtim so succinctly put it, “Why do free social networks tilt inevitably toward user exploitation? Because you're not their customer, you’re their product.”
I don’t have a problem with corporations in general; what I have a problem with is the use-it-for-“free” business model in which we all pay with our data. I don’t use Gmail, but I do use Dreamhost and MobileMe because I pay not with my data, but with cash.
I know there are concerns about privacy becoming a privilege of the wealthy, and that’s a valid concern, but let’s face it: as a service, Facebook does provide a great deal of utility. At the recently-floated $50 billion valuation, each user is worth under $100. Would you be willing to pay Facebook $8/month (which would earn them far more over the life of a customer than $100) for no ads and to have them exclude your data from all aggregation? I know I would, but I don’t know where the public’s values lie.
People, Conversations, and Dangerous Things
Why medium collapse is bad for communication
Google and Facebook have been working on some interesting projects lately that try to group and otherwise organize people's communication based on the way each company feels people conceptualize their communication. Though email threads weren't new, even back in 2004 when Gmail came out, "conversations" that included sent messages were a unique [citation needed] addition. So, message organization 1: conversations.
Then Google came out with Wave, which obviously didn't last long and wasn't the revolution Google was hoping for. I believe this was because email and instant messaging have traditionally come with different expectations about normative behavior, and the choice of one or the other can be a strong signaling mechanism. Formality, expected length of response, how long is acceptable before responding, and even implied tie strength all play a role in media choice [citation needed]. Google Wave collapsed these two media into one, eliminating the communicative power embedded in media choice alone, confusing users in the process. This is message organization 2: conversations on steroids. Everything is still threaded more or less by conversation, but it becomes less dependent on media choice.
Recently, Facebook began rolling out its new messaging system. This system does two interesting things. First, rather than thread by conversation, it threads by recipient, much the way the SMS app on the iPhone does. Second, while not as unique from a design standpoint, it goes farther than Wave did in its attempt to almost completely abstract the message away from the medium. Their whole pitch was basically that it would let you send a message to a person, without having to think about what medium you were using. In theory, this sounds great, but they forgot that, like I said, different media do actually have different affordances, and media choice can be an almost active participant in a conversation. To write a long-form email, a quick hello, or a social coordination message (SMS-style) all in the same interface just doesn't make sense to me, especially when the sender can't know what kind of device the recipient will be using.
In a small concession to this awkwardness that I think speaks volumes about the way people really use different communication channels, Facebook did add two checkboxes in the messaging interface:
One lets the sender decide whether or not to send the message to the recipient's mobile phone, and the other essentially changes it from IM/SMS mode (press return/enter to send) to long-form mode (press return/enter to insert a line break). These completely change the nature of the medium, and I'm not convinced they should ever have been combined in the first place.
Assuming a conversation/people dichotomy for message organization, how does usage context play a role? Is the conversation model more appropriate in a task-oriented environment, which email often is, and is the person-no-matter-the-medium model more appropriate to social contexts? Maybe. But I'm going to stop here.
And of course, I need to bump George Lakoff's book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind to the top of my reading list now.
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.
So you want to compete at CHI?
My former teammate Debra Lauterbach recently wrote a great blog post with suggestions for potential CHI Student Design Competition participants. I agree with everything Debra said, but I wanted to weigh in with my own thoughts, reflections, and ideas, as well.
Trust the process
I was fortunate enough to have taken SI 682, the course that can provide a framework for the CHI competition, in my first semester at SI, and concurrently with SI 501, the Contextual Inquiry class. While I don’t want to bias anyone who has yet to take 501, I was really glad to have been exposed to the Contextual Inquiry process first in 682 (682’s schedule runs faster than 501’s). I might not be allowed to say this out loud, what with PEP credits and all, but by choosing to do a CHI project, you are probably opting to work without a client. As a more independently and entrepreneurially minded person, I appreciated this, especially because it gave me an opportunity to experience Contextual Inquiry on a more student-directed project; in SI 501, it felt like forcing a project with little to no intrinsic merit into the CI process just for the sake of doing the process. When applied appropriately — and by taking appropriate liberties — the process can be very revealing, as was the case for our project. Our solution was drawn directly from, and involved a symbiotic relationship between, two of our personas. Our personas were developed directly from our affinity diagram. And our affinity diagram was synthesized directly from our interviews.
Design what matters
As Debra described in her post, the Student Design Competition is not an interface design competition, but that doesn’t mean you can focus entirely on research and concept/service design. The visual design of your poster and presentation matter — a lot. While the judges and their interests change every year, there will almost certainly be someone who cares about visual design. In 2009, the then-coordinator of the SDC, Jon Kolko, gathered all 10 semifinalists teams together in a huddle and tore us collectively to shreds for having, on whole, poorly designed posters. Which leads me to my next point:
Check out the judges
If you make it to the semifinals, once they’re announced, look up each of the judges and make a note of their interests. It doesn’t take much time, but when we found out that one of our judges was very process oriented, we knew to include process material on our poster, and we knew what to engage him on during the poster session.
Narrow the scope
Local is big; diversity is big. Before you even begin your research, narrow the problem space you’ll be investigating. We narrowed “local” to “stuff that is already in your local community that people are buying and importing new anyway.” This broad space led to thoughts around borrowing, and finally led us to thrift shops, as Debra describes. Diversity can mean a lot of different things, so instead of trying to “jump to solutions”, come up with a short list of what diversity can mean, then focus your research from there. Solutions will emerge from your research.
Engage with the community; make it relevant
Southeast Michigan provides many fascinating case studies in diversity: U of M took its admissions policy to the Supreme Court; de facto segregation between Detroit and the suburbs is still prevalent; Detroit’s per capita annual income is under $15,000, while two adjacent counties are among the nations 100 wealthiest; Dearborn is the heart of the American Arab and Muslim communities, the latter of which in particular is experiencing huge growing pains and assimilation questions. Once you’ve decided what aspect of diversity you’ll be looking at, get out there and talk to people: activists, non-profits, and regular folks on the street. Being engaged and relevant will make your project so much more compelling.
Have a solution that pushes the boundaries of the acceptable
A mobile app that establishes trust between total strangers to the point that they will be willing to walk together in the dark? Getting people to look for items at thrift stores for you? Sounds crazy, no? But these are the solutions arrived at by the previous two winning teams. They are original, non-obvious, and decidedly push the boundaries of what seems sociologically feasable. This is what excites the judges — or at least is what excites me. But to pull it off, you have to demonstrate that it can work, which nicely segues to the penultimate point:
User testing ≠ sociological feasibility testing
And you should do both! You will end up doing some user testing, but it’s more for the class than for the competition. Sociological feasability testing is what you really need to back up your work. For us, that meant two things: spending a day in area thrift shops looking for items people were asking for in existing venues like craigslist and Freecycle, and tracking down representatives of our personas and determininng whether they would play the roles we wanted them to. Last year’s team went through a similar exercise, spending many hours in a cold, dark Diag getting reactions to their system.
If you can confidently tell a judge that your hair-brained scheme at least has a good change of working, and you can point to existing academic research and your own legwork to prove it, you’re probably in pretty good shape.
Get going!
Getting to the point where you’re in good shape is a lot of work, so start now. As a first-semester student, I was expecting things to ramp up slowly. Fortunately, I had a couple second-year students on my team to snap me out of it. I distinctly remember getting an email from Debra fairly early on suggesting that we have two or three interviews done — by Wednesday. It freaked me out a bit, but certainly got me moving. It’s an exciting pace at which to work, and 100% worth it.
Good luck!
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. [↩]
Why?: A few thoughts on Adam Greenfield's Everyware
Sections one through three are posited on the assumption that everyware is, in fact, something that we (“we” the citizens and consumers in the First World) actually want. I am not convinced, so I was very relieved to read the second half of the book, in which Greenfield recognizes the many potential pitfalls of ubiquitous computing, pitfalls that I believe will prevent (hopefully!) an everyware at anything near the scale he seems to want.
There is nothing more irritating than a computer trying to predict what I want. (Those icons are on the desktop for a reason, whether I use them or not. And when I’m ready to make a list, I’ll let you know.) Yet most of his examples until the end involve rooms that predict your lighting and temperature preferences and other such uselessness. But today, each of these “manual” actions represents a decision, a choice that helps us shape our daily lives. In much the same way Twitter informs through awareness of the routine, our lives are shaped by the performance of the routine. Everyware threatens to deny us the everyday decisions and circumstances that make life interesting. As Malcolm McCullough once said, “I have an active role in programming the thermalscape of my domestic scene.” Likewise, though only acknowledged briefly in a footnote, everyware also has the potential to deny us the serendipitous interactions that break up everyday monotony at least, and open opportunities at most.
Not until the end of the book, perhaps feeling a little defensive after enumerating many flaws and potential hazards of everyware, does Greenfield provide useful examples of ubiquitous computing. I hope that whatever comes of this, it does not annoy, does not surveil, and does not further alienate the “users”.