A Death in the Community

Scott Herhold probably thought he had a great human-interest story. The sad tale of a San Jose man named Phil Gustafson who’d slowly retreated from the world, cut himself off from ties to people and the basics of everyday living, and died alone, unmissed and unmourned - well, it’s got pathos in bucketloads, the sort of story designed to make you stop for a moment over your morning coffee and appreciate the people in your life. Who could resist? 

Except there’s a problem; the story isn’t so simple. In the networked world - a world first built by Phil and his generation of geeks - you can’t always tell who is alone, or even what being alone really means, quite so easily.

I first met Phil in 1994, over the Internet, in the hazy distant days when (to quote another member of that circle of friends) meeting people over the Internet wasn’t creepy, it was just weird. Before the Web, when geeks and nerds congregated on Usenet, we hung out together in alt.folklore.urban, a Usenet newsgroup dedicated to tracking and debunking urban legends. A lot of what Scott Herhold found out about Phil in his online search for who he’d been traces back to that community, right down to the quip in quotation marks in the sign-off, a subcultural marker the group regulars all used (here are some examples from my own posts).

Usenet stopped being much other than spam and piracy a long time ago, but friendships are different: the alt.folklore.urban folks aren’t the only group of friends who still stay in touch. Phil and I attended weddings and funerals together, we’d both attended group get-togethers all over the country, and while we weren’t close friends, we had the familiarity only a long-shared community can provide. I hadn’t seen him in years, but I still tell stories in which he gets the last line. He had his demons, but he was fundamentally a good person, and I’m not the only person who felt the news of his passing like a kick in the chest.

Herhold’s article was published on the afternoon of January 18th. I don’t know when the first of Phil’s friends spotted it, but by the 19th, when I heard about it, there were comments on it from our mutual friends all over the world, testifying that Phil would not be either unmissed or unmourned. Herhold’s article noted that the coroner’s office was awaiting official identification; the alt.folklore.urban old-timers’ mailing lists pulled out every reference they could find to Phil’s brother and sister in the email archives, tracked them both down, and took on the awful task of informing the family, so at least they’d hear it from someone who cared about him.

To me, perhaps the most remarkable part of this story is that it’s totally unremarkable, and yet probably surprising at the same time. Online communities do remarkable things every day, from raising money for charity to fighting laws that threaten their existence to stopping someone from getting caught up in a sex trafficking ring. But we still don’t necessarily think or know how to look for someone’s online affiliations and community memberships. 

Phil doesn’t fit our stereotype of the always-on “digital native”: he was a shy senior citizen. Herhold did go online to learn more about him, but Phil’s primary digital haunts - mailing lists and online poker games - are out of Google’s grasp. It’s true that for all of his online friends, Phil was only found because the mail and papers piled up outside his door - especially over the holiday season, when many people are offline visiting family and friends, his online silence wasn’t particularly notable. As the first generation of computer nerds who found their friends online age into their 60s and 70s, maybe we need a better system to let distant communities know when something is wrong. For now, though, I hope the outpouring has comforted his family, and maybe taught a columnist something about assuming too much in a human-interest piece. 

One of our friends, writing from New Zealand, commented on the article, which dwelled on Phil’s isolation from his neighbors:

phil was an early adopter of e-mail, usenet and other forms of on-line socialisation and he was a very social person on-line. he died with his computer on. why is there an assumption he was alone? most likely he had been socialising with someone just before falling asleep for the last time. is that not the most we can ask for? he lived in an age which allowed him to find a peer group of like minded people which spans the globe and travelled great distances to meet those people in person. i would say his horseshoe worked for him. he will be missed by many.

Stop SOPA and PIPA

If you’re reading this on January 18, 2012, and wondering why there’s a black bar over the logo of this site, please visit americancensorship.org to learn more about the bills currently in front of the U.S. Congress that are serious threats to the Internet’s future, and what you can do about them.

If you’re in New York City, please join me and a couple thousand of my friends at the emergency NY Tech Meetup at the offices of Sens. Schuster and Gillibrand. I’m disgusted they are supporting this legislation, and I intend to let them know. I hope you’ll reach out to your representatives as well. 

A brief programming note

While sorting through a bunch of comments I hadn’t realized were waiting for approval (sorry!), I looked at my Squarespace stats and realized that my post on the way Sherlock’s first season uses your screen to display the characters’ text messages is still one of the most highly trafficked pages on this site. So I’ll take this opportunity to post a big pretty picture of Benedict Cumberbatch let anyone who might be waiting for a followup know that I haven’t yet had a chance to watch all of the second season.

The first episode, which has a lot of on-screen text, and a mobile phone as a major plot point, suggests there’s a lot to talk about, but I want to see what happens in the next two episodes before making any grand claims about Paul McGuigan’s baroque period.

How to Not Suck at Design Research

The title of this talk was “How to Get Out of the Building Without Taking the Building With You” - that is, how to do design research without getting hamstrung by the presuppositions you bring to the process. Thanks to enthusiasm from my beta listeners, though, I ended up putting in a long section on design research synthesis, and in retrospect, I think a broader title would have served it better. If I do it again, I’m calling it “How to Not Suck at Design Research.” 

Update: My friend Steve Portigal notes that the day we met, sharing the stage at SHIFT, he gave a talk called “Seventeen Ways to Not Suck at Research.” Clearly, a talk that made an impression! So maybe I will stick with the original name after all….

Many many thanks to the great Ryan McCarrigan of the Lean Startup Meetup and Lean Startup Machine for inviting me to talk and making the event such a pleasure to attend, and to Josh Seiden of Proof for suggesting that I try giving an Ignite talk in the first place. The constraints of the form - 5 minute talk with a slide change every 15 seconds, whether you’re ready for it or not - are terrifying, but as any good designer knows, constraints can help with creativity, and the talk was a joy to create.

Computers and the "real" world

The world we live in today is made of computers. We don’t have cars anymore; we have computers we ride in. We don’t have airplanes anymore, we have flying Solaris boxes with a big bucketful of SCADA controllers; a 3D printer is not a device, it’s a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer; a radio is no longer a crystal, it’s a general-purpose computer with a fast ADC and a fast DAC and some software.

- Cory Doctorow, The Coming War on General Computation

This is a fundamental change, and like most fundamental inflection points in the way we see the world, it will take most of us a while to catch up to it. But as interaction designers, it’s useful to be reminded of why our work matters, and why thinking of it as something that only happens in web browsers and traditional apps is so limiting. There are interactions everywhere; go make them better.

Info-viz Everywhere

In the "why did nobody think of this sooner?" product development category comes the Knitter's Pride Dreamz from Webs, a large knitting supplies store. The needles, made of a laminate birch wood, are color-coded by size.

This may seem like a small thing to non-knitters, but if you've ever sorted through a set of similar sock needles, the sizes of which can vary by just a few millimeters in diameter, searching for a set of five that match, it's something of a Eureka! moment.

There's also an interesting product development story deducible from this launch. One of Webs' competitors, KnitPicks, also makes wooden needles out of a birch laminate, but theirs are multi-colored. Webs had market validation that knitters would buy brightly-colored needles made of this material, and likely no desire to step into the interesting legal thicket surrounding the KnitPicks design. Whether it was because they were consciously looking for a differentiator, or the opportunity for making knitters' lives easier just independently struck someone on their team, it's a super-smart choice, and deserves a spot on the top of any knitting designer's holiday wish list. (cough, cough)

(image from yarn.com)

Circling the Nest Thermostat

Last week, Nest Labs launched a new programmable thermostat. It got a lot of press, not just because it’s expensive and innovative and beautiful, but because Nest Labs was founded by Tony Faddell, who led the iPod team for years, and senior leadership includes other key iPod team members and a MacArthur fellow.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last year and a half thinking about programmable thermostats, and how to help homeowners save money by managing their energy use. Some of those thoughts I’m going to have to keep to myself, even though I’m no longer at EnergyHub, but there are a few things not directly related to my work there that I haven’t seen discussed in all of the hullaballoo, and I think one in particular is worth spending some time on. 

Which is to say, I was really struck by the physical form of the thermostat itself. The company’s video tour highlights one of the cleverest touches - the stainless-steel outer case that allows it to blend more cleaning into the surrounding wall. After all, the whole reason most thermostats are beige is that it’s the lowest common denominator—Nest is solving the same problem more elegantly (though I do wonder about finger smudges…). But I really liked most of all that it’s a circle.

Image copyright Nest Labs

I grew up with a boxy beige thermostat with little lever-ish setpoint markers on the top. So to me personally, there’s nothing particularly resonant about the circular form factor. But after spending a lot of time talking to people about home HVAC systems, I know that l’m in the minority on that. The circular thermostat from Honeywell, designed by the great Henry Dreyfuss, is a minor icon of mid-century modernism: it’s just what a lot of people think of when you ask them to visualize a thermostat. The digital thermostat moved away from that shape to mark itself as something new (and also, to be frank, because it needed more space for its components). In time, the rectangular form factor became a marker of technological advance: you had something digital, programmable, and new.

The Nest Learning Thermostat takes another technological leap forward: it’s billed as a thermostat that learns its program from your behavior. It’s a thermostat with actual intelligence - possibly a scary thought on a cold night! How do they make it seem friendly and familiar regardless? Return to the circle. After the age of the impossible-to-program digital thermostat, the circle not only says “thermostat,” it says “simple and familiar.” From the manufacturer’s side, having the primary control be the stainless steel ring around the outside cut out the cost of a custom touchscreen component, and gave the design team the opportunity to design controls that (at least in the video) feel almost analog and yet highly precise at the same time.

The original iPod’s physical design, on launch, was constantly compared to a deck of cards. It needed to be small, to travel well, and it needed to be iconic, to stand out among the crappy existing options. The white earbuds were a brilliant touch, letting you display to everyone else at the gym or on the train how ahead of the curve you were. At home, though, it’s at least as much about comfort as display. A familiar form, an organic shape, something that’s beautiful up close but blends in at a distance, that’s what makes the Nest thermostat look premium in the home, and it’s almost the exact opposite of what made the iPod look premium in 2001. I still have a lot of questions about the Nest Learning Thermostat, but I’m beyond impressed by how much the people who made it know about making highly desirable consumer objects, and how much they were willing to learn from a classic. 

What does a chatbot need to know?

I got a new iPhone 4S last week, and after having had my last iPhone (the 3G) since January 2009, I was blown away by how much faster the new phone is. Not to mention the value of voice activation - to be able to ask my phone “where am I?” and get an answer almost immediately feels nearly magical.

After seeing all of the various Siri Easter eggs people have been posting, I figured I’d come up with one that would be a softball. But Siri whiffed it: 

Well, I thought, maybe it’s my upbringing, with my Greatest Generation grandparents, that makes me think you’d want to teach Siri that the correct answer to “say goodnight, Siri” is “Goodnight, Siri.” And so I went about my day.

The next day, however, I tried again, and I succeeded:

Once I got past my delight that it worked, and the associated delight in hearing the line delivered in Siri’s flat mechanical voice, I started thinking about why the Abbott & Costello routine would have made it into the programmers’ basket of Easter eggs, and Burns & Allen’s closing “say goodnight, Gracie” bit would not have.

AIs, even a fake-AI like Siri, needs a certain amount of cultural savvy to interact with its users, and to project for us what we insist on calling a personality even when it’s not attached to a person. A smart journalist I know thinks that “software personality designer” will be a separate career path within the next decade; I tried convincing him that that was what interaction designers already do, bring personality to their products, but the more time I spend with Siri, the more I start to think that such specialization may actually be necessary, because there is so much to consider and know.

In Richard Powers’s novel Galatea 2.2, there comes a point when they have to teach the AI at the center of the book about all the things its human trainers know that aren’t captured in the literary works they’ve been teaching the AI to read. The catalogue of items goes on for dizzying pages, because, as Powers’s narrator remarks, “worldiness was massive.” It will be interesting to see how and in which ways Siri becomes more worldly, and how that changes the experience of using it.

Until then, though, if anyone from the Siri team reads this: next iteration, the appropriate response to “say goodnight, Siri,” is “Goodnight, Siri.” Thank you, and remember to tip your waitress.