Rachel

Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing, by Malcolm McCullough is about Pervasive Computing from an architect’s point of view. Design will be an important factor in pervasive computing; without it the embedding of computers in everyday life will be overwhelming. There will be “information pollution,” with too many gadgets too handle. As McCullough wrote, “You don’t have to distrust technology to want to keep it in its place (p. 3).”

The new field of interaction design mediates how significant technologies will be in our lives by deciding how many degrees of interactivity there will be between humans and computing objects. With ubiquitous computing, there will be microchips in everything around us. In fact, there nearly already are. At Intel less than one-quarter of the chips made actually go into computers. The need for interaction designers is especially clear when one considers MIT’s Project Oxygen’s glimpse of the future, “In the future, computation will be human-centered. It will be freely available everywhere like batteries and power-sockets, or oxygen in the air we breathe. It will enter into the human world, handling our goals and needs and helping us to do more while doing less (p. 7).” Interaction designers need to take a hand in pervasive computing to stop information pollution from overwhelming users. “Its purveyors assume no more responsibility for information pollution than nineteenth-century industrialists did for dumping sludge in the river (p. 17).” Interaction designers must be architects, sociologists, psychologists, and management consultants all rolled into one in order to keep a firm hold on pervasive computing.

We are experiencing a paradigm shift from computers to computing, from cyberspace to ubiquitous computing. “Information technology has become ambient social infrastructure. This allies it with architecture. No longer just made of objects, computing now consists of situations (p. 21).” Users have certain expectations of what computing and technology will do to their lives. Interaction designers have to monitor “expectation management,” because “What technology can do may not be so important as what we want to do with it, and whether that is reasonable (p. 23).” With pervasive computing, the desktop computer will be obliterated. It has already been around for twenty years, a record for a piece of information technology. The technology and information that is having trouble being contained within the PC will be unleashed, “Pervasive computing has been hailed as an escape from the desktop and a chance to start over. On the other hand, unless design can intervene, it is also a chance for computer technology to become even worse, and far less escapable (p. 68).”

McCullough fears that designers and users are ignoring the new trend of ubiquitous computing. He fears that through their ignorance it is falling into the hands of major corporations and governments, who will use it for surveillance purposes. The fear of surveillance does not scare people as much as it should, however, because the benefits of computing outweigh this negative. Also, McCullough points out, “omnicompetance” will be low. There will be too much information gathered through the type of surveillance that can come through ubicomp, and not enough communication or time to keep track of it all. Once pervasive computing is paid attention to by interaction designers, it will be put in the periphery. It will become invisible, so as to be simple for users to adapt to in their lives, “…information appliances let you carry out particular activities without having to be aware of any computers that may be involved (p. 70).”

This book was meant to be a manual for architects looking to become intellectual designers. Although it was a bit bogged down with architectural jargon, it was still an interesting look at the futuristic trend of ubiquitous computing.

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In Everything is Miscellaneous: the Power of the New Digital Disorder,David Weinberger explains the new ways in which knowledge is being restructured because of the digital world. With the influxes of information streaming along the Internet, we must find new ways of organizing it all. Sometimes, though, the best way of organizing mass amounts of information is through the miscellaneous, through disorder. In the world of the miscellaneous, “we are rapidly miscallanizing our world, breaking things out of their old organizational structures and enabling individuals to sort and order them on the fly (p. 96).” Weinberger writes that “Over the course of the millennia, we’ve developed sophisticated methods and processes for developing, communicating, and preserving knowledge. We have major institutions—serious contributors to our culture and our economy—devoted to those tasks….Now we have to invent new ways appropriate to the new shape of knowledge. We are doing so at a pace unparalleled in our history (p. 102).” There is a revolution in knowledge coming upon us, but how are we going to keep it organized?
Weinberger begins by explaining old ways of organizing information, including how we organize our daily lives. He points out that we organize all parts of our lives to a tee, from our laundry to our books. “We invest so much time in making sure our world isn’t miscellaneous in part because disorder is inefficient…but also because it feels bad (p. 12).” Objects in our world always start out as miscellaneous, and humans work incredibly hard at reordering and straightening it up.
When it comes to the digital world, however, organizing becomes almost impossible. “Search Google for ‘American history,’ which is just one Library of Congress subheading, and you’ll get 750 million Web pages—about twenty-six times the number of books in the Library’s entire collection. The Library of Congress’s carefully engineered, highly evolved processes for ordering information simply won’t work in the new world of digital information (p. 16).” Even indexing experts have trouble controlling digital information. But it doesn’t really need to be controlled by them. Instead, it can be controlled by machines and by users. Sites like Wikipedia and Delicious are the best examples for ways the digital world organizes itself through the miscellaneous. Just as in Ambient Findablity, Weinberger compares these sites to the way early humans found their way in the world. They wore away paths, one person following the paths others had worn, until eventually paths began to fork, and signs (new tags) were needed to show which new ways the paths could take you.
When it comes to a site like Wikipedia “The best digital strategy is to dump everything into one large miscellaneous pile and leave it to the machines to sort it out (p. 88).” Wikipedia wouldn’t work if it were organized like a regular encyclopedia. Instead, Wikipedia’s servers log each way people use to access articles and uses algorithms to bring them their searches faster. This not only gives users what they need, it also gives them things they didn’t know they needed. “The gap between how we access information and how the computer accesses it is at the heart of the revolution in knowledge. Because computers store information in ways that have nothing to do with how we want it presented to us, we are freed from having to organize the original information the way we eventually want to get at it (p. 99).” A search for one thing leads to others because the servers have logged what people might be looking for. The miscellaneous factor of searching for information on the Internet actually adds to its utility.
The organizational structure of Wikipedia is completely differently than that of most knowledge, “but its shape, freed from the two dimensions of paper, better represents the wild diversity of human interests and insight (p. 100).” The usual structure of knowledge is like a tree. Things are put into categories which hang on branches. This can be troublesome because some objects can hang on many different branches at once. Putting objects into one category reveals the flaws of the indexer by showing the other possible categories it could have gone into. Delicious is a perfect example of organizing through the miscellaneous, because users can tag objects with as many tags as they want. This ensures that users will be able to find what they want in one way or another. “At Delicious, tagging a Web address with multiple tags in effect puts it on many branches. Yet despite the lack of a well-organized scheme of categories, Delicious can make a list of twenty thousand Web addresses thoroughly usable (p. 93).” There is no one way of organizing digital data. What works for one user might not work for others. Each person has different ways of ordering, which add value to the power of the miscellaneous.
Weinberger also discussed the ways in which knowledge is going through a revolution. By taking power away from organizers and indexers and putting it into the hands of taggers and searchers, knowledge is becoming more accessible.“…Physical limitations on how we have organized information have not only limited our vision, they have also given the people who control the organization of information more power than those who create the information (p. 89).”

Following is a brief summary of Weinberger’s 4 New Strategic Principles for organizing knowledge:

1. Filter on the way out, not on the way in
“…where there’s an abundance of access to an abundance of resources, filtering on the way in decreases the value of that abundance by ruling items that might be of great values to a few people. Filtering on the way out…increases the value of that abundance by locating what’s of value to a particular person at a particular moment (p. 103).”

2. Put each leaf on as many branches as possible
Delicious is a good example of this. Instead of categorizing items onto one specific branch, they are given as many labels as possible, allowing them to have better usability. This is especially important because the order of one may not be the order of another, but the many different orders of many people will be useful to at least a few.

3. Everything is Metadata and everything can be a label.
“Now that everything in the connected world can serve as metadata, knowledge is empowered beyond fathoming. We can not only find what we need based on whatever slight traces we have in our hand, we can see connections that would have escaped our notice (p. 105).”

4. Give up control.
Categorizing reveals missed information.

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