It’s dark outside and it appears to be making its way inside, like a fog seeping through the minuscule cracks and gaps in the window and attempting to fill the room.
This week’s render was a total pain to do. It’s actually technically quite simple; I was reminding myself of how to work with force fields a bit but for some reason bits of my brain failed to work and I had to re-render twice. The first time I forgot to put the simulation on so nothing came back. Then I tried again and for some reason the collisions weren’t working. Anyway, that’s why I’m late. Sorry. Meanwhile Matthew Plummer Fernandez has been messing around with some Mœbius shaders that looks super amazing.
It’s also been a bit much this week. In my hubris I decided to start a lot of projects this year thinking it would be fun and now I’m trying to juggle them all and get as much done as I can before people slink off for Christmas. That and making some steaming progress with the PhD means I’m at this desk 15 hours most days and honestly I had a bit of a head blank trying to remember what I read or did this week. I’m mostly catching up on more dated academic stuff at the moment to bolster some contextual work, it’s all amazing but not very hip and modern. For instance, I’ve been reading some interesting things about how experts selectively intuit the world from Karin Knorr Cetina and Charles Goodwin. It’s one of those things that just makes you go ‘of course!’ on every page and firms up some vague notions you, a minor bureaucrat, might have held.
Of Bicycles, Bakelites, Beeps and Boops.
Speaking of things that you read that suddenly make sense of stuff; I was devouring Wiebe Bijker’s work the week before about how rhetorics emerge around new technologies to ‘stabilise’ them in society. In the Social Construction of Artefacts, he and Trevor Pinch suggest that technological artefacts have a flexible definition through their development until they are ‘stabilised’ where they become coherent and normalised amongst social actors and groups. They, and others who have used this framework say that stabilisation is fought out in rhetorics – the way the technology is discussed and described in the media, press and reporting and that it occurs in two ways: Firstly, ‘rhetorical closure‘ or a general consensus on the terms and concepts used when talking about the technology and secondly, ‘problem redefinition‘ which often happens when a technology has it’s application and role changed in the process of stabilisation.
In Bijker and Pinch’s work they use the bicycle as an example, particularly to John Boyd Dunlop’s invention of air-filled tyres in 1887 which were invented by Dunlop for his son to make cycling more comfortable. Up to this point wheels were made of wood or metal and there wasn’t much in the way of smooth roads. Engineers and bicycle manufacturers struggled to convince people (mostly men) that tyres were better. They were perceived as being unsafe by creating instability and ‘un-manly’ by cushioning the rigour of cycling. So, two parallel things happened; firstly a sustained advertising campaign in the press espousing their safety and secondly, Dunlop paid to have his wheel entered into races where, of course, they proved to be significantly faster. In the first instance is rhetorical closure, creating a media environment where air-filled tyres are associated with safety and in the second is problem redefinition; tyres were created for comfort but they are presented as aids to speed.
Madeiline Akrich goes further and suggests that this process of stabilisation also creates (or fails to create) the users that have been imagined by the developers. The users of the air-filled tyre were imagined to be women and children who weren’t ‘manly’ enough to use metal or wooden wheels, but Dunlop created and expanded the entire user base by redefining tyres as a solution to speed.
There’s lots more great stuff in there about the form-factor as well, how the Penny-farthing and similar models that were seen as the de-facto form of the bicycle came to be overtaken by the ‘safety bicycle‘ – a form originally invented (again) for women and children to learn how to cycle but is now standard.
This is the bit where I go ‘All this is to say that…’
All this is to say that I was listening in on a Clubhouse chat the other day about the future of interfaces and was a little disappointed and quite angry. I’ve written and talked before about how I often find that conversations of future technology have been blunted by the relentless torrent of futurity in the world such that there is a real paucity of imagination. There’s so much future around that people seem to struggle to see anything else. So it all ends up looking the same and new people parrot the things the people before them said. The folks present at this future of interfaces thing tended to divert into one of two sets of cliches: Either a nostalgia for a past they never experienced and consequently idealised of the ‘remember when you knew the name of everyone in the local shop? What if that but an app?’ type. Or continuing down the marginal-capital-gains route of closer and closer scrutiny of people’s behaviours in further flawed attempts to divine their needs and intervene to sell them things. Chuck in terms like ‘behaviour’, ’empathy’ and ‘AI’ and you’ve got a pitch that would probably do pretty ok at a UX event or whatever.
A lot of the stuff I bang on about comes down to this idea of what would technology be like if it wasn’t just about being faster, stronger, more consumptive and productive? Now it’s arguable, as Alfred Gell suggests, that’s where art lives and I’ve also banged on about that. But this thing on future UI either trying to replicate misremembered pasts (The Holodeck paradox as N. Katherine Hayles calls it) or just fuelling the fire of data-fying humans and calling it ’empathy’ made me think about what precedents there are.
Which is where my thought returns to the bicycle. (I know I’m predictable and frankly my thoughts always return to the bicycle which may be helpful in this instance ok). You see, in 1887(!) they were arguing about whether air tyres were ok or not and I bet if you look outside or even around your abode right now you will find a trace of a bicycle. Either an actual one, parking for one or bits of one. Both of those interface futures assume that whatever interface we have now is not good enough – either not giving us some ‘authentic’ experience or not providing enough data. If the logics of these future interfacers prevailed and the general logics of technological futurity worked, then we wouldn’t even have bicycles! The ‘inevitable’ path of progress would have seen them supplanted by the car. In the teleological way in which people involved in these things talk about technology; the bicycle is slower, has less carrying capacity, produces less capital and contributes to the economy signifcantly less than the car. So why have bicycles not only remained but remained the world’s most popular form of transport relatively unchanged for 150 years? (Although sticking batteries in them is amazing and I’m excited for everyone who gets into cycling now. Please get a bike you cool dude, you.)
Because people do not think transactionally and teleologically. Bicycles are fun. They’re fun to ride and they make you feel good – they rarely fulfil primary drives for efficiency, speed, power, consumption and production. There are, of course, enormous exceptions and I will happily rattle on about the efficiencies of cycling in a place like London but precisely the things that draw people to cars (comfort, ease of use, safety) turn them off bicycles. Cue my ‘fast, fun, free’ routine. Of course, interface designers are aware of fun. It is referred to as ‘playful interaction’ which is the slightly nicer version of gamification which is still about leading someone towards buying something or giving up some information.
So then the question is what the bicycle of interfaces is? What’s the thing that the teleology of progress just can’t outrun that will just stick around defying either rhetorical closure or problem redefinition or come to encompass them all. I suspect it may be in video games – because again, the primary drive is fun and where it’s been twisted into money-making scams it hasn’t gone well. Not that I’m calling interface design a money-making scam.
Video games are still a strangely stigmatised sore-thumb amongst design folks. Despite being the world’s most popular media they are nervously talked about, seen as a lesser media and it can take me a while to tease out of people that they enjoy them and I suspect (this is for another post) that this is because unlike reading, thinking, making etc. they don’t fulfil the performance of self-improvement that concerns most design and creative folks. They don’t appear to be for anything and yet are enormously popular which is why, like the bicycle, I imagine they’ll have significant longevity. Anyway, you really want Nicolas Nova for this stuff not me.
Perhaps this is also a flaw in Bijker’s thinking – that technology has to be teleological, it has to be for for something; to fulfil some need. I always return to Alfred Gell’s technology definition that it is first; a tool, second; the knowledge on how to use the tool and third; the social necessity for the use of the tool. My work is on how that social necessity is formed or invented. The bicycle is of course a primary means of transport for many without access to cars or the supporting infrastructure and its resurgence in the urban centres of Europe and the US could be seen as a result of climate conscience and cost efficiencies but this again assumes that people make decisions out of economic self-interest and not because it’s fun and cool and you look awesome.
Anyway, think on it; what interface will still be around in 150 years, relatively unchanged, just cracking on because people enjoy it?
Small Stuff
Look how easily I got out of that half-formed diatribe by just jumping to the next section. I have no editor and I can do whatever the hell I like and if you read this far you may as well finish.
- Silicon Valley tech has started to realise that Europe is the biggest threat to monopolisation, tax avoidance and unethical data practices so the big four invested $23 million this year in lobbying policy makers. This is like the thing that we need to keep reminding ourselves. I know people who work at these places, and they’re lovely and smart and care but the other side of them is a bunch of lawyers and PR people who are paid inordinate amounts to try and keep the grey areas of the business by which they profit in the grey. That is as real as all the people talking about ’empathy’ at UX events: the people taking policy makers out for expensive dinners to try and get court cases dismissed. It’s the same ship ok.
- You know, corollary to that these same people also fund climate change denial. I’m in a cranky mood today. Again, people at Google, Apple etc. are lovely but their business model is predicated on keeping policy scrutiny away and if that involves funding fringe right-wing climate conspiracies they’ll bloody do it because the ends always justify the means.
- I guess I’m just fed up of people who work for Google saying ’empathy’ which appears to have become devoid of meaning (problem redefinition)
- Talking about scale, holy crap the size and audacity of this mendacious disinformation campaign out of India is like something out of a Thomas Pynchon novel.
- NVIDIA have launched a DIY AI kit because why not, they’re NVIDIA, they can do whatever they like. You don’t see much on ‘Citizen AI’ as much as citizen space, science and data. Is there a kind of co-op AI culture out there? Feels very cyberpunk and cool if there is.
- God I can’t wait to see the back of Evernote.
- I have decided, I am going to replay Disco Elysium this Christmas, I have never replayed a game before. I might try streaming bits of it on Instagram. Video games are great, reading is boring and you would admit it if no one was around.
Right, that’s it, particularly cranky this week but hearing young, caring, thoughtful people parrot the same lines that have been repeated for the past decade without a dose of self-reflectivity makes me sad. Look. I love you. Thank you for reading this again. Let me know if you want to talk as you know I love hearing from you. What day is it? Bye.