Thesis 57

Appropriate design documents and conventions do not yet exist.

One unexpected factor that that may inhibit the development of everyware for some time to come is that, while the necessary technical underpinnings may exist, a robust design practice devoted to the field does not. As designers, we haven't even begun to agree on the conventions we'll use to describe the systems we intend to build.

Consider what is involved in an analogous process of development, the design of a large-scale Web site. The success of the whole effort hinges on the accurate communication of ideas among members of the development team. The person who actually has to code the site is joined by the visual designer, who is responsible for the graphic look and feel; the information architect, responsible for the structure and navigation; and perhaps a content strategist, who ensures that written copy and "navitorial" convey a consistent "tone and voice." When sites are developed by agencies operating on behalf of institutional clients, invariably there will also be input from a client-facing account manager as well as representatives of the client's own marketing or corporate communications department.

The documents that are used to coordinate the process among all the parties involved are referred to as "deliverables." A reasonably comprehensive set of deliverables for a Web site might include visual comps, which depict the graphic design direction; a site map, which establishes the overall structure of the site as well as specifying the navigational relationship of a given page to the others; schematics, which specify the navigational options and content available on a given page; and task flows and use cases, which depict trajectories through the site in highly granular detail.

All of these things are signed off on by the client, after which they are released to the software development engineer, who is then responsible for the actual coding of the site.

When done conscientiously, this is an involved, painstaking process, one that can go on for many months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Success in the endeavor depends vitally on accurate deliverables that clearly convey what is required.

No such deliverables currently exist for everyware. If everyware presents situations in which multiple actors interact simultaneously with multiple systems in a given environment, in three dimensions of space and one of time, we lack the conventions that would allow us to represent such interactions to each other. If everyware implies that the state of remote systems may impinge quite profoundly on events unfolding here and now, we scarcely have a way to model these influences. If everyware involves mapping gesture to system behavior, we lack whatever equivalent of choreographic notation would be necessary to consistently describe gesture numerically. And where the Web, until very recently, was governed by a page metaphor that associated a consistent address with a known behavior, interaction in everyware lacks for any such capacity. As designers, we simply don't yet know how to discuss these issuesnot with each other, not with our clients, and especially not with the people using the things we build.

At present, these challenges are resolved on a bespoke, case-by-case basis, and development teams have tended to be small and homogeneous enough that the necessary ideas can easily be conveyed, one way or another. This is strikingly reminiscent of design practice in the early days of the Weba glorious moment in which a hundred flowers certainly bloomed, and yet so terribly disappointing in that ninety-six of them turned out to be weeds.

Just as was the case with the Web, as everyware maturesand especially as it becomes commercialized and diffuses further into the worldthere will be a greater demand for consistency, reliability and accountability, and this will mandate the creation of deliverable formats to account for all of the relevant variables. It is true that such design documents did not exist for hypertext systems prior to the advent of the World Wide Web, and that a practice developed and to some degree became formalized within just a few years. Nevertheless, with regard to everyware, this conversation hasn't even properly started yet.