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Musings on emerging technologies
I just updated a plugin1 by clicking a button. I knew updates were available because a very noticeable red circle appeared on this interface.
Before it was possible to update with a single click, I’d connect to my server, download the update, then put the files in their place. Not as easy as a mouse click.
Perhaps we don’t think about it this way, but our computers, applications, services, all have a type of awareness. They pay attention in a way. At the bare minimum they pay attention to a clock. But at a much higher level, they do what we tell them to, and when. Though if they don’t, it’s no fault of theirs.
I wonder how aware applications are going to evolve and if it means our household appliances, cars, flashlights, and vacuums will email us or update an RSS feed telling us they need something.
The web and web services2 make it easier for systems to reach each other any time they want. This is changing our service expectations, social networks, and how we connect (or don’t connect) with people we know are a click away.
Brings to mind an impression I’ve had when in a big city where hundreds of people are going about their business seemingly oblivious of the people around them.
Image: Taken heading to the parking garage after representing HCI to candidates visiting SI at the Michigan Union.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Plugins are additional bits of functionality that people besides the creators of Wordpress write that anybody can use. [↩]
- Open APIs, SOAP, Servlets, PHP, ASP…basically anything running on the server accessible via web ports. [↩]
Our need for feedback
I see it all the time. People want feedback. We want to know when we’re doing something right or wrong. Most of the time the world gives you feedback in the form of basic cause and effect. But feedback from another intelligent being is something else entirely.
I had a chemistry professor who would ask us whether we agreed on something or not. If nobody answered he would follow up with, “silence is consent.” That has stuck with me for 16 years. Silence is not consent. Sometimes it takes time to think of a response, to give meaningful feedback.
Spent most of the night working on a paper where I’m having to state a design claim related to regulating behavior in online communities. I’m using Yelp as my focus of study and am thinking about how it allows one member to compliment another member in a publicly visible and persistent way. Compliments stick and the world can see who received and who gave them. This is interesting because praise, when sincere, can unquestionably influence behavior.
But enough about that. I’ve been pondering this design claim for most of the night and will continue to dissect it over the next few nights until I finish writing 1500+ words about it.
This semester is well on it’s way and I’m feeling it. At the same time I don’t want to rush life past. It’s all so interesting.
For some reason I’m fascinated with an avocado seed. And I golfed my first round of the year today. Weather was great. 70 degrees and sunny. Summer is around the bend.
Image: Taken during class on Monday. I sit for 3 hours in a sweltering classroom paying crazy money to share ideas.
Personality and opinion in social attachment
As the adoption of online social networking use continues, attention is being given to notions of design that attract, retain, and influence behavior. A prototypical online community has an active user base with design mechanisms built for attracting new members and allowing existing members to go on hiatus1.
A design alternative being seen in online communities where a member of the community can vote or rank on the contribution of another is very interesting to me. I’m writing about it in a paper this week but the whole notion has me thinking about what motivates people to interact online. Whether it’s a full, well thought out reply or an endearing remark about an ultrasound, what motivates someone to contribute? Is it easier to give a virtual thumbs-up on something someone shared than it is to write them an email or message them?
Regardless of your whatever internal barriers someone has to embracing social networking, if given a way to see acts of opinion by people you may have only met briefly, maybe never talked to directly, it is evidence of personality that will likely attract and keep your attention. And this attraction is a motivator to interact. Designs that allow people to show facets of their personality through the expression of opinion allow for points of attraction and thus the development of identity and bond-based attachments to social networks2
Maybe Weinberger is right when he talks about the digital order allows people to come together like molecules forming and splitting. Molecules form because of alignment and necessary attraction between atoms3.
Too much thinking so early in the morning perhaps. Time to go to work.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Often permanently. I never went back to Orkut. [↩]
- Incorporates ideas from a Ren, Kraut, and Kiesler paper titled, “Applying Common Identity and Bond Theory to Desing of Online Communities” 2007, Sage Publications. [↩]
- From “Everything is Miscellaneous” [↩]
Interaction affordances
Next on my list was to download and print the articles for this week’s subject from my class on managing the IT organization. I wasn’t sure if I’d already done this or not, but needed to take a peek at the forums anyway, see how many people had posted overnight.
I navigate to the Resources section of the site and download the ZIP file containing the articles to my local drive and notice there is already a folder for this week, but no ZIP files in it. So I download and navigate to open it.
And there, among all the PDF articles from the original ZIP I’d previously downloaded and exploded, is the ZIP I just downloaded.
Then I remember deleting the ZIP file after I decompressed its contents the first time. After all, why would I need it later? I had what I needed.
This morning I realized it would have been a signal. It would have afforded me awareness of something my brain wasn’t remembering. It would have reminded me that I’d already downloaded it.
When disk space is so cheap maybe it is more affordable to leave crumbs where you’d been…even if that means leaving ZIP files around.
Speaking of affordances, it was almost a year and a half ago that I took Interface and Interaction Design with Mick McQuaid where we thought critically about affordances in the design of interfaces. After embracing the idea of things being affordances, you start to see them where you didn’t see them before. Like as a reason to not delete a ZIP file.
What got me pondering that class was a recent comment the professor left on a post written here during the start of that most interesting and challenging class. It’s funny looking back. Not funny haha, but funny in that awkward way.
Image: One of a collage of pictures taken of physical things that afforded interaction. Plus I like the metaphor of doorways.