August, 2006
75 posts under this date.
Google’s Music Search represents one important future of Google’s “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” mission: digesting the chaotic web and regurgitating it anew, catalog-like, simpler and more standardized (which has worrying implications, but is also a wonderful prospect, provided it’s just one more option). Yes, this is similar to what it actually does through search, but the difference is that this new Google-digested web is browsable, not just a black-box accessible piecemeal only through question & answers. Google wants to become the interface.
No one knows what it would do to a creative brain to think creatively continously. Perhaps the brain, like the heart, must devote most of its time to rest between beats. But I doubt that is true. I hope it is not, because [interactive computers] can give us our first look at unfettered thought. It can allow a decision maker to do almost nothing but decision making, instead of processing data to get into a position to make the decision.
J.C.R. Licklider, Invited commentary after ”The Computer in the University” talk by Alan Perlis at the Sloan School of Business Administration, April 1961, as quoted by M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine, p180 EE (emphasis added)
The mouth-wide-open wonder at today’s technologic possibilities that begun with my grandfather’s mosaicELZR, has not subdued—what with my succesful cloning of The EconomistELZR tables or my quick spideringELZR—but it has gradually become an expectation. I’ve thought long and hard about it and am finally ready to accept it.
Because, in the end, disbelief of what we can now accomplish is only laziness by another name. I have a (much cherished) cousin who shuns digital photography altogether because it’s too easy. I say that’s bollocks. If manipulating photos is now mom’s play, that only means the challenge moves to being creative with the tools at hand. And when machines become creative (as they will no doubt do), then our challenge will be to find good things for them to be creative at. And when they figure that out—well, we’d better be seafaringEE by then.
But after all, civilization is some 15k years old, so what’s the wonder? We should be gods by now (and we are, in a way).
Overview and Detail. The pair keeps coming up whenever you start pondering on interfaces, interface patterns, interface & information design, and well (why won’t be grand?) space, time,ELZR and thought itself. Achieving both—the ancient dream of simultaneity—is one of the deep purposes of any media creator, from writersEE to interface designers, and though it may be a humble example, The Secret Lives of Numbers—an interface to the results of a crazy study of the search-engine popularity of every integer between 0 and 1 million1—is a superb one.
The resulting information exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns which reflect and refract our culture, our minds, and our bodies.. We surmise that our dataset is a numeric snapshot of the collective consciousness. Herein we return our analyses to the public in the form of an interactive visualization, whose aim is to provoke awareness of one’s own numeric manifestations.
The denizens of the number line are not the mere automatons or corporate tools we have made them out to be: each has a personality, talents, communities, and sometimes a little je ne sais quois. They reflect us. This unusual reflection is the focus of this project.
As for the credits:
Concept, direction, interface design & programming: Golan Levin
Interface and information design: Martin Wattenberg
Database & CGI programming (2002): Jonathan Feinberg
CGI programming (1997): David Becker
Statistics consulting: David Elashoff
Essay and research: Shelly Wynecoop
If you believe in geniuses you’re in for a treat checking out the three URLs above—each of them’s one. Martin Watenberg in particular, has some of the most intriguing information visualizations I’ve ever seen.
1 Though owing to limitations of internet bandwidth only data for the first 100,000 are provided online.
Man! What withA all the delightfully absorbing work I’ve set myself to, I’m tremendously unexercised these days. Tonight I washed my teeth and it occurred to me half-jokingly that that was about all the exercise I was going to get for the day. It’s true.
Ours are (by nature) unusually plastic brains whose biologically proper functioning has always involved the recruitment and exploitation of non-biological props and scaffolds. More so than any other creature on the planet, we humans emerge as natural-born cyborgs, factory tweaked and primed so as to be ready to grow into extended cognitive and computational architectures: ones whose systemic boundaries far exceed those of skin and skull. ( p5—emphasis added)
Andy Clark’sWP fab Natural Born Cyborgs? is at times techno-lyrical to the verge of incomprehension (or overpretentiousness—normal pretentiousness is of course to be cherished), but there are many thought-provoking paragraphs to be found in this essay of his (also the introduction of his same-titled 2003 bookAM ).
The conjecture, then, is that one large jump or discontinuity in human cognitive evolution involves the distinctive way human brains repeatedly create and exploit various species of cognitive technology so as to expand and reshape the space of human reason. We, more than any other creature on the planet, deploy non-biological elements (instruments, media, notations) to complement (but not, typically, to replicate) our basic biological modes of processing, creating extended cognitive systems whose computational and problem-solving profiles are quire different from those of the naked brain. Human brains maintain an intricate cognitive dance with an ecologically novel, and immensely empowering, environment: the world of symbols, media, formalisms, texts, speech, instruments and culture. ( p4—emphasis added)
Particularly interface-relevant is this gem right here.
The cognitive anthropologist Ed Hutchins WP, in his book Cognition In The WildAM depicts the general role of cognitive technologies in similar terms [i.e. as thought prosthetics], suggesting that “[Such tools] permit the [users] to do the tasks that need to be done while doing the kinds of things people are good at: recognizing patterns, modeling simple dynamics of the world, and manipulating objects in the environment.” This description nicely captures what is best about good examples of cognitive technology: recent word-processing packages, web browsers, mouse and icon systems, etc. It also suggests, of course, what is wrong with many of our first attempts at creating such tools: the skills needed to use those environments (early VCR’s, word-processors, etc.) were precisely those that biological brains find hardest to support, such as the recall and execution of long, essentially arbitrary, sequences of operations. ( p4—emphasis added)
The book itselfAM I haven’t (yet) read. Something at first warned me away from it, making me imagine it would be too repetitive and “impressionistic”. But I just read the quote below, and I’m intrigued. It’s on the wishlist.
These [Alzheimer] patients were a puzzle because although they still lived alone, successfully, in the city, they really should not have been able to do so. On standard psychological tests they performed rather dismally. They should have been unable to cope with the demands of daily life. What was going on?
A sequence of visits to their home environments provided the answer. These home environments, it transpired, were wonderfully calibrated to support and scaffold these biological brains. The homes were stuffed full of cognitive props, tools, and aids. Examples included message centers where they stored notes about what to do and when; photos of family and friends complete with indications of names and relationships; labels and pictures on doors; “memory books” to record new events, meetings, and plans; and “open-storage” strategies in which crucial items (pots, pans, checkbooks) are always kept in plain view, not locked away in drawers.
Before you allow this image of intensive scaffolding to simply confirm your opinion of these patients as hopelessly cognitively compromised, try to imagine a world in which normal human brains are somewhat Alzheimic. Imagine that in this world we had gradually evolved a society in which the kinds of scaffolding found in the St. Louis home environments were the norm. And then reflect that, in a certain sense, this is exactly what we have done. Our own pens, paper, notebooks, diaries, and alarm clocks complement our brute biological profiles in much the same kind of way. Yet we never say of the artist, or poet, or scientist, ”Oh, poor soul—she is not really responsible for that painting/theory/poem; for don’t you see how she had to rely on pen, paper, and sketches to offset the inadequacies of her own brain?”
Today marks the first day in a long time I had to wear a sweater in my room. The sticky hot season is officially over. Yey!
Don’t you feel you work much better when it’s briskly?
(On the flip side, it rains every damn day, power goes out frequently, and you can’t wear shorts because of mosquitoes… oh well.)
I loved the above composition. Perhaps it’s just that I took Scott McCloud’s Understanding ComicsWP epiphany too seriously, but I feel there’s something deep about it. Space and time are one, do you see? The three small panels on top convey a quick sequence (and I can’t help but hear a zippo clicking open and the smallest of sighs), while the long panel invites us to rest on her at leisure. And we can go back, turn back time and see it all over again. Or stop it altogether and focus on the third panel with its bright flame. Or we can go backwards, make it into an infinitely regressive spiral. Or we can try and take it all in one visual gulp. Present is where you are. And all it takes is looking.
Space is time’s ultimate interface.
There’s also another superb quick-closeup, similar in structure, in AnimatrixWP ’s Final Flight of the OsirisWP. It’s more joltingly impactful, to be sure, but that’s also its greatest shortcoming: it’s gone before you notice it. Our interfaces have evolved and our media player can let us see it slowly, frame by frame, but we can’t readily choose our frame. We can’t try and take it all and dream of synchronicity. That is, we can’t unless we space the frames.
As I said on a previous post, I believe Spanish, my mother tongue, has a low status on the web. And as I laid there pondering the subjectivity of my assessment, I remembered Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiWP’s fascinating account of how (and why) he became a scientist (it appears in John Brockman’s excellent Curious MindsAM, a compilation of similar tales by top-notch scientists and a sure recommendation to anyone).
The particular anecdote that came to mind was when he and a friend quarrelled over whose neigborhood was the more communist (the matter was relevant because he was living in Italy and the country was then in political turmoil). Their brilliant analytic idea to try to settle the question was to count out the circulation of the left- and right-leaning newspapers in each of their neighborhoods’s newsstands. This of course sent them into all sorts of interesting statistical considerations, but it put them on the path of finding the subtle answers to their question, and it was certainly better than “the hocus-pocus most adults rely on to bolster their arguments”.
So I want to try to do something similar with my question—what is the linguistic vitality in the web of 14 languages?—and this post will be the beginning of my investigation. For reasons of practicality and personal bias, the 14 languages I’m going to settle to are: EnglishWP, GermanWP, FrenchWP, PolishWP, JapaneseWP, DutchWP, ItalianWP, SwedishWP, PortugueseWP, SpanishWP, FarsiWP, ChineseWP, EsperantoWP, and HindiWP.
I can’t believe I forgot to put a link to this feature when I read it three months ago. Anyway, Fortune’s How I Work is a gallery of in-depth looks at how 13 leaders (mostly executives) work through their day. Well worth the read.
It is trapped inside some hideous, caging frameset, so here are some links (and pictures!) straight to the content.
I just discovered Jensen Harris’s—Lead Program Manager on the Microsoft Office “user experience” team—wonderfully interesting Office User Interface Blog. It deals mostly with the new interface to Office 2007 and—boy—are they cooking some sweet, major stuff!
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