Thesis 31

Everyware is a strategy for the reduction of cognitive overload.

Happily, there are also less distressing arguments in support of everyware. One of the original motivations for conducting research into post-PC interfaces, in fact, was that they might ameliorate the sense of overload that so often attends the use of information technology.

An early culmination of this thinking was Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown's seminal "The Coming Age of Calm Technology," which argued that the ubiquity of next-generation computing would compel its designers to ensure that it "encalmed" its users. In their words, "if computers are everywhere, they better stay out of the way."

While part of Brown and Weiser's apparent stancethat designers and manufacturers would find themselves obliged to craft gentle interfaces just because it would clearly be the sensible and humane thing to domay now strike us as naive, they were onto something.

They had elsewhere diagnosed computer-mediated information overload and its attendant stress, as some of the least salutary aspects of contemporary life. Even residing, as they then did, in an age before the widespread adoption of mobile phones in North America, they could foresee that the total cognitive burden imposed by a poorly designed ubicomp on the average, civilian user would be intolerable. (One wonders to what degree daily life at PARC in the early nineties prefigured the inbox/voicemail clamor we've all since grown so used to.) And so they set for themselves the project of how to counter such tendencies.

The strategy they devised to promote calm had to do with letting the user shift back and forth between the focus of attention and what they called the "periphery"that which "we are attuned to without attending to explicitly." Just as, in your peripheral vision you may see objects but not need to attend to them (or even necessarily be consciously aware of their presence), here the periphery was a place where information could reside until actively required.

To design systems that "inform without overburdening," though, you'd need to call upon a different set of interface modes than the conventional PC keyboard and mouse. Brown and weiser thought input modes like these were a big part of the problem; roy want and his co-authors, in a 2002 paper, flatly state that "[n]ondesktop interface modalities, such as pen, speech, vision, and touch, are attractive" to the enlightened interface designer "because they require less of a user's attention than a traditional desktop interface."^[*]

^[*] The presence of "speech" on this list, and in so many depictions that come after, is interesting. Mark Weiser explicitly excluded voice-recognition interfaces from his vision of ubiquitous computing, pointing out that it would be "prominent and attention-grabbing" in precisely the way that "a good tool is not."

The ideal system would be one which was imperceptible until required, in which the user's focus fell not on the tool itself but on what they were actually attempting to do with it. were there any real-world examples of such imperceptible tools that might be offered, so that people could begin to wrap their heads around what Brown and weiser were proposing?

One of the first things they cited happened to be a feature of the hallway right outside their offices: artist Natalie Jeremijenko's installation Live Wire (also known as Dangling String). This was an "eight-foot piece of plastic spaghetti" attached to an electric motor mounted in the ceiling that was itself wired into the building's ethernet. Fluctuations in network traffic ran the motor, causing the string to oscillate visibly and audibly.

When traffic was low, Live Wire remained largely inert, but when activity surged, it would spring to life in such a way that it could both be seen by hallway passers-by and heard throughout the suite of nearby offices. you might not even be consciously aware of ityou would just, somewhere in the back of your mind, register the fact that traffic was spiking. Jeremijenko's approach and the results it garnered were true to everything Brown and Weiser had speculated about the periphery.

Despite its success, this was the last anyone heard of calm technology for quite a few years; the cause wasn't taken up again until the late 1990s, when a company called Ambient Devices offered for sale something it called the Ambient Orb. The Orb was a milky globe maybe ten centimeters in diameter that communicated with a proprietary wireless network, independent of the Internet. It was supposed to sit atop a desk or a night table and use gentle modulations of color to indicate changes in some user-specified quantity, from the weather (color mapped to temperature, with the frequency of pulses indicating likelihood of precipitation) to commute traffic (green for smooth sailing, all the way through to red for "incident").

These examples are certainly more relevant to the way life is actually livedmore actionablethan a simple index of bits flowing through a network. But what if the information you're interested in is still more complex and multidimensional than that, such as the source, amount, and importance of messages piling up in your email inbox?

London-based designer/makers Jack Schulze and Matt Webb, working for Nokia, have devised a presentation called Attention Fader that addresses just this situation. It's a framed picture, the kind of thing you might find hanging on the side wall of an office cubicle, that appears at first glance to be a rather banal and uninflected portrait of a building along the south bank of the Thames.

But the building has a lawn before it, and a swath of sky above it, and there's a chapter of pathway running past, along the river embankment, and Schulze and Webb have used each of these as subtle channels for the display of useful information. Leave town for a few days, let your in-box fill up, and the number of people gaggling on the river path will slowly mount. Ignore a few high-priority messages, and first cars, then trucks, and finally tanks pull up onto the lawn; let the whole thing go, and after a while some rather malevolent-looking birds begin to circle in the sky.

But subtly, subtly. None of the crowds or trucks or birds is animated; they fade into the scene with such tact that it's difficult to say just when they arrive. It's precisely the image's apparent banality that is key to its success as a peripheral interface; it's neither loud, nor colorful, nor attention-grabbing in any obvious way. It is, rather, the kind of thing you glance up at from time to time, half-consciously, to let its message seep into your awareness. Those who see the picture at infrequent intervals mightn't notice anything but a London street scene.

Schulze and Webb's project is a paragon of encalming technology. It points clearly to a world in which the widespread deployment of information-processing resources in the environment paradoxically helps to reduce the user's sense of being overwhelmed by data. To invert Mies, here more is less.

As the global audience for computing surges past a billion, with each of those users exposed to tens or even hundreds of different technical systems in the course of a day, such encalming is going to be an appealing business case every bit as much as an ethical question for system designers. Brown and Weiser were probably wrong as to just how strong an incentive it would provide, they were correct that the specter of global information overload would prompt at least some developers to pursue less intrusive interfacesand these, in turn, will underwrite the further spread of everyware.