Dear Colleagues,
Herewith pass on _ Notes on the new design space _ from Phil Agre's
excellent Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE).
Best regards,
Ken Friedman
--
From: Phil Agre <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 03:31:43 +0200
To: "Red Rock Eater News Service" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [RRE]Notes on the new design space
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Notes on the new design space
Phil Agre
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
May 2000
4000 words.
Information and communications technologies don't create much that's
new; rather, people use them to amplify forces that already exist.
A hundred forces operate in society, and many of them conflict with
one another. It follows that we cannot generalize about, for example,
"what the Internet does". Nobody knows enough to evaluate all of the
changes, and so nobody can tell us the bottom line.
Design, then, means selective amplification -- amplification, that is,
we hope, of things we value. What are the technologies for amplifying
community? Some communities operate at a low level because their
members' lives don't bring them together enough, or because they don't
have enough shared sense of identity. Yet within every community is
a force toward a higher level of community life. A community needs
a shared identity, a collective memory, a repertoire of ways of doing
things together, familiar genres of communication, ways of moving
along from newcomer to oldtimer, places and landmarks, a language and
a songbook. Information and communication technologies can amplify
those things, or provide some of their conditions, but in the end it's
the community that does it. Design has to be okay with that.
The design space is exploding, and so design must change. Information
technology has few opinions of its own. It is plastic, malleable.
Design means reconciling constraints, but now fewer of the constraints
are dictated by intrinsic properties of the technology. It need no
longer be heavy, or to sit in one place, or to be connected by wires.
It can be woven into the artifacts and patterns of daily life in an
unbounded variety of ways. So we have to be more imaginative. The
technology can take an infinite variety of forms, so we need much
more information before we can choose. We have to imagine our lives.
Too much imagination is gadget-centered, or else driven by archetypes
that are completely removed from the practicalities of the machinery.
Society is made of institutions: settled patterns of roles and rules,
relationships and languages, repertoires and terrains of action into
which we are all socialized. We take for granted the workings of
banks, schools, markets, meetings, the news, street traffic, visits
to the doctor, and a thousand other arrangements. The weirdness and
brilliance of information technology is that all of those arrangements
are liquifying. Many of them existed to solve informational problems,
or were limited by informational problems. They depended on a stable
assignment of activities to places. But with information technology
they are all suddenly being renegotiated. People used to drop acid
to get this effect. But dropping acid is insanely dangerous, and now
we can get the same effect for free. We can best see what a thing is
when it's changing, and now everything is changing. The rules of every
institution of society are being renegotiated, and we are either party
to the negotiations or we aren't.
Design is increasingly public. One designs information technology by
inscribing social discourses into machinery, and the machinery and the
discourse coevolve. Technical standards need not embody a consensus
in any formal sense of the word, but they certainly provide an outcome
to a debate. Right now, for example, we are all oppressed by the poor
to nonexistent model of human relationships that is inscribed in the
software of personal computers. People who write viruses do a public
service by making this fact visible. Will the public debate over such
events cut deep enough to shape a new understanding of trust? Or will
they simply lead to reactive lawmaking? We're growing a whole branch
of government to protect society from the poor model of society that's
implicit in Microsoft products. That's not good.
What is public design? Hackers, in the original sense of the word,
change the world by designing things. They see the power of a tool.
They value rough consensus and running code. But intellectuals are
hackers too. They intervene in the collective cognition of a society.
These are grave responsibilities. Ideas become machinery; machinery
becomes ideas. Each can set the other straight. Each can confuse.
E. P. Thompson wrote an influential paper about the fashion for pocket
watches when pocket watches were new. People would spend large parts
of their wealth to get one. They served to get one to places on time,
and they also served to signify. Neither happens without the other.
What does the Internet signify? The Internet came along at the moment
when engineers -- at least the leading cultural edge of them -- were
surrendering the centuries-old conception of engineering as the Godlike
giving of rational order. What's to take the place of that conception?
Engineers facilitate local ordering. Rather than discover and optimal
order, they provide a platform. That's the ideal, which we code with
the word "open". But platforms, alas, are public goods. If markets
epitomize the otherwise inchoate wish for an open society, we've been
learning that marketplaces are commodities too.
As society liquifies, design becomes a way of life. The word design
has been understood in two broad ways, deriving from engineering and
from art. The two understandings are converging. It was once thought
that engineering is a rational process. But we've come to a deeper
understanding of process. The artists were right: design is a process
of discovery. Can engineers get used to discovering things? If you
accept the possibility and necessity of discovery then you surrender
the expectation of knowing everything. You accept that you are not
God. Engineering reason still has a purpose. One creates temporary
islands of order, discovering as one goes along which abstractions
might be broadly useful to others and then rationally designing those.
As platforms multiply, it becomes possible to do amazing things in an
afternoon, in a garage. The platform provides more and more of the
functionality. That, again, is the ideal. Some people use the term
"platform" to refer to programmable hardware, but the deeper meaning
is: something that you can build things on top of. Platforms nest,
with new ones built on old ones. As the platforms stack up, the newer
ones come closer to the experience and concepts of ordinary people.
A microprocessor does little that any ordinary person cares about,
but a payment system, for example, needs to speak the same language
as the people who use it. Platforms become geographic strata, rigidly
interwoven with a diversity of practical arrangements in society, so
it's important to get them right.
The rising tide of standardized platforms presents a challenge for
design. Good design means having a single, clear conception that can
inform the design on every level. The internal architecture of the
machinery, the packaging it comes in, its physical form, the ways you
get help with it, the community of people who use it -- all should
express the same idea. But the design space is exploding because of
the economies of scale that come with standardized platforms. A new
conception of the world can only cut so deep into a design if seven
eighths of the design are ordered from a catalog. Traditional systems
analysis and design classes imagine a world of bespoke software,
every line designed from scratch. The world isn't like that anymore,
if it ever was. The design of information technology is collective
and cumulative. One isn't designing for a green field but a tangled
network.
The concept of cyberspace is an artefact of old-fashioned technology.
The "computer terminal", with its big flat screen, presents a membrane
between two worlds, often glossed crudely as "atoms and bits". It's
not like that. We're going to redistribute information technology
so that it's not something separate. We're not going to redesign our
lives so that information technology is a separate place. The idea
that information technology is a separate place from the rest of the
world was always just a lobbying campaign: your laws don't apply here.
What a pallid form of imagination. We will not migrate into a realm
of bits. Rather, we will reorganize and redistribute our lives, both
individually and collectively. We will codesign our technologies and
our ways of life. We can do this well, or we can do it badly.
Who is "we"? The collective design of information technology is a
complex thing. Here's a simple model. Will we move to technology
A or technology B?, we'll all ask. Both technologies exhibit network
effects, so that they are only useful if a critical mass of other
people is using them. And everybody knows this, too, having seen it
happen with other technologies previously. So even though the two
technologies might have real benefits and disadvantages for various
groups, nobody will move until they figure that everybody else is
going to move. The reflexivity of this process is exquisite. The
supposedly decentralized society of information technology is always
building consensus about design issues that affect everyone. It is
nothing short of a political process. Self-fulfilling prophesies will
count for a lot. So will the forms of imagination that, when shared,
make consensus easier if not automatic.
It's not really a consensus, however. That suggests that everyone's
voice counts equally. Network effects need a critical mass, not a
unanimous agreement. The parliament of technology enfranchises the
early adopters, the ones who create (or fail to create) the critical
mass for a new technology. And the early adopters are the affluent
and the gadget-obsessed who value the devices for themselves and not
what they can do. We need forms of imagination that are anti-gadget.
Professional designers, perhaps, are latecomers to the scene of the
accident. The real design has been done by poets, and intellectuals,
and propagandists. And by social movements. Designers work with the
raw materials of form and meaning. Sometimes they are arbitrageurs.
To the extent that the design of information technology is collective,
design becomes a way of life. You can't just move from job to job.
Standards are designed by committee, and they build network effects in
the technical public sphere. Design becomes advocacy. The designer
becomes a representative for all of the people whose attentions are
still elsewhere, who don't know the stakes in a design process whose
results will become irreversible by the time they ever hear about it.
What would it be like to have amplified communities? Think about the
people whose role-playing games can involve dozens of people and go on
for weeks. They can remap a whole landscape with alternate meanings
and become lost in the drama of their alternate world. That is one
model. It's immersive in the truest sense: not being enclosed in a
box of machinery, but imagining one's way into an alternate terrain.
One can be enclosed in a box, surrounded by high-resolution displays,
and not be immersed at all. What would an immersive artwork be like
that one would want to inhabit for 24 hours?
Media companies merge in order to provide immersion in the broader
sense. A child can live all Pokemon all the time -- Pokemon in every
medium, through every sense, every moment. From an economic point
of view, the media company is achieving economies of scope. The work
that goes into devising the symbols -- the characters, narratives,
design themes -- is leveraged across more products, and the work done
on each can promote the others. Someone who is immersed in Pokemon
can find numerous outlets for that immersion. Pokemon stands out
because of the uncanny sense that small children live in a different
world that is increasingly colonized by large media companies, but
the same goes for a lot of other synthetic meaning systems as well.
Social movements can be immersive. Indeed probably do not succeed
unless they are. A social movement needs cultural forms, and it needs
institutions. It needs to provide everyone with something to do, and
it needs to spot and recruit talented people. It needs to provide a
repertoire of action forms, and this includes both ways of changing
laws and ways of having a party. The challenge, of course, is to be
all-embracing without being oppressive. Social movements thus rise
and fall, each becoming rigid and providing fuel for its opponents.
This is healthy, perhaps, in the very longest run, wasteful and often
dangerous as it seems in the short run.
What makes a community worth an investment of one's time and effort?
The strength, in some spiritual sense, of the people who are involved
in it. The degree of shared meaning that they can build up without
turning that shared meaning into a way of controlling one another.
The distribution of labor: democratic organizations are too often run
by a few people who carry the entire load and then burn out or become
resentful. The quality of leadership: framing a vision rather than
manipulating. The culture: people either have good habits or they do
not, and they approach their joint activities from either a standpoint
of positive expectations or a standpoint of powerlessness. Could a
machine ever fix such problems? It's very much the wrong question.
If a community and its machines are both informed by a common vision,
then other communities that don't work can fade away.
Here's the paradox of design: design is supposed to make something
new, but it depends on astute observation of what already exists.
Many designers resist observation because it feels conservative: who
cares what already exists, given that we're about to make it obsolete?
And indeed, observation can be shallow. When you look hard enough,
you see just how interconnected the elements of our existing world
really are. How could one possibly change it? Yet it does change.
"People resist change", the control freaks say, but this is a libel.
What they mean is "people resist my changes". In truth, everyone
embraces change -- longs for it. So what is the role of observation?
Observation must be analytical, seeing the world not as a tangled
whole but as a process in motion, a surface with depths, with moving
parts, with forces whose development has been stunted so far by the
means readily available to hand. What forces do we want to equip?
That's the question for design. People will embrace changes they can
understand, and so one must observe understandings and engage with
them. If designers are no longer the engineers of human souls, what
can they be? They can be interlocutors, partners, provocateurs, even
leaders, just so long as they comprehend their own location in the
whole.
The new design space afforded by information technology is basically
about connection. Computing power is only somewhat useful by itself.
It's good for speech recognition and a few other things. But the
technology mostly challenges us to become aware of our embedding in
a set of relationships. This can take a lot of forms, which we can
explore and reinvent. Here's a thought experiment. Every one of us
has six billion relationships -- one for every other person on earth.
Each of those relationships has its architecture: you are near or
close, you disclose some information and not other, you possess some
information and not other, you are on good terms or bad, speaking or
not, you are doing business, and your relationship is more generally
embedded in one or more of a thousand institutions with their rules
and expectations. You must manage every one of those six billion
relationships, and in a networked world you must increasingly manage
every one of them in real time. Once you would call someone once
a week; now many people call one another ten times a day. Why not
a hundred times? The calls are shorter, of course, more incremental.
The thought experiment is extreme, of course: we are finite beings,
and we could never keep track of six billion people in real time.
But professionals often keep track of thousands of people in their
social networks, and more generally in the universe of people whose
careers they track as part of their own institutionally organized
world. Agrarian societies, perhaps, had no use for a concept such
as "networking": having and consciously using a conceptual framework
for initiating, evolving, and managing large numbers of relationships
in a strategic way. The very word "networking" retains the nasty
connotation of "knowing people" and "politics" -- a sense that rich
people and managers just build social networks rather than doing real
work, and a sense that someone who moves dextrously among many people
can mislead them all. In a dynamic world, however, networking is a
fact of life. Networking skills need not be organized by means of a
conscious framework of concepts and strategies, however. The people
who live immersed in new communications technologies, and adolescents
in particular who invent new customs around the technologies as they
set about inventing themselves, are pioneers of new cultural forms for
managing relationships. The technologies themselves presuppose overly
simple or outright false models of these relationships. What other
models could they presuppose?
The standard computer-science approach to answering this question is
similar to that of the standard business-management approach: make a
conceptual framework, then embed that conceptual framework in practice.
But as computer systems are increasingly intertwined with real life,
this design practice is showing strains. A whole research community
is concerned with "groupware", and the central problem of groupware is
that the systems are too rigid. One frames a concept such as a "task"
or a "role" or a "rationale", builds data structures that go by those
names, and expects people to represent themselves to the machine in
those terms. One then discovers that group activities are much more
complex than that. For computer science it's a puzzle: groups speak
of tasks, roles, rationales, and so on, and yet they are not able to
represent those things digitally.
This is the problem of structure in system design, and it is a hidden
crisis. One response is to discipline everyone to conform to the
structures. Once the flow of work has been inscribed in the machine,
everyone has to organize their work in the way that the machine says.
Life becomes more structured, and this increase in structure may be
the point. It's a means of control in senses that can be both bad and
good, depending on where you stand. Another approach is to relax the
demands for structure. Paper documents, for example, are typically
semi-structured. Even the most rigid form provides a lot of room for
negotiation, and document genres exist largely to be violated, and
not as grammars to be followed in a mechanical way. Document genres
create expectations, but they do not necessarily impose constraints.
Computer science assumes that all structures should be formalized,
since after all a computer can only compute with data that it can
capture, and captured data is only meaningful within a structure
of standardized meanings and practices. Data can only be searched,
aggregated, and computed with to the extent that it is structured.
Because it is concerned almost entirely with the inside of the
machine, computer science has not reckoned adequately with the deep
trade-offs around structured data. And because of this, as Judith
Gregory observes in her new dissertation, computer science is utopian
in a profound and not especially useful way.
No wonder, then, that the rest of the world has come to see computers
as a communications medium. The price of structuring one's life in
order to create structured data is too high, but the benefits of being
able to connect with others electronically are enormous. We are still
using very unstructured email and voice communications, and we do not
submit our electronic interactions to all that much structuring. The
best "community" systems do both: imposing small amounts of structure
on the interaction but then providing free-text interaction forums
as well. Think of eBay: it imposes moderate amounts of structure on
the auctions that users post, but leaves a big space for unstructured
text describing the goods. It offers structured choices about payment
terms, but also allows users to opt out of those structured choices
and simply explain the terms in the unstructured text. It imposes
structure on the bidding process, emphasizes that the structure derives
from legal contracts, but then provides limited room for negotiating
one's way out of those contracts. It counts "feedback" points but
leaves room for free-text feedback comments and replies up to eighty
characters. At each point, the border between structure and free text
is thought through, or evolved. To computer science, however, this
picture will be frustrating, because for computer science progress
depends on discovering and imposing more and more structure on data.
Can't the world progress beyond eBay? To the computer science way of
thinking, it's a sad thought.
Still, eBay is a "community" in only the most primitive sense. Being
a marketplace, it really does push toward the extreme "six billion
relationships" model of society. Everyone's good are on display for
the world to see, and everyone has a public persona. (They do provide
facilities for private auctions, but the real leverage of an online
auction service is that it's an intermediary for an unbounded range of
people.) Economic sociology makes it clear that markets are embedded
in societies much more broadly, but this embedding can be structured
in many ways. Embedded or not, some market mechanisms are much more
impersonal than others. Our conceptions of "market" and "community"
are in tension no matter what the economic sociologists say, and one
can have very different sorts of "communities" on different scales.
The world's stock exchanges are embedded in a community as well, one
drawn together by the financial press and the democratic public sphere
more generally. But this community is no longer a small world. And
what is eBay is embedded in? The answer will presumably be different
in each distinct market that eBay mediates: the antiques world will
work differently from the computer world or from consumer electronics.
Standardized products can be traded more anonymously, for example, and
markets in nonstandardized products demand greater knowledge. In some
markets vendors often buy from one another, and in others a customer
will develop long-term relationships with a vendor who then buys for
that customer on the open market.
What does design mean in such a world? Design needs the conceptual
equipment to draw deep distinctions among social worlds, and to notice
deep analogies between them. When activities and relationships are
structured so deeply by institutions, and by the particularities of
communities and their customs, and by the diverse practicalities of
embodied activities, one cannot design for "people" in general, much
less for "users". Nor can one expect to design a gadget that's useful
on its own. Just as participation in a social world is a long-term
immersion, the work of the designer is long-term as well. Technology
is indeed moving quickly, but the capacity of social arrangements
to digest technology will always be limited. The huge quantitative
improvement of the technology provides an irresistable force, but the
social world provides an immovable object to meet it. Not immovable,
exactly, but movable on its own terms, along its own vectors, with
deep respect to its own forms of imagination and its own structure of
interests. Design can participate in these movements. It can lead
them, in the deep sense in which leadership, as a variety of politics,
is the art of the possible. Or it can follow them, or confuse them,
or become irrelevant to them. As life itself becomes inescapably a
matter of design, design necessarily becomes continuous with life, or
coterminous, as the case may be.
end
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management
+47 22.98.51.07 Direct line
+47 22.98.51.11 Telefax
Home office:
+46 (46) 53.245 Telephone
+46 (46) 53.345 Telefax
email: [log in to unmask]
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