the architectures of information spaces
DESCRIPTION
Closing keynote at the UX Poland 2014 "The Human Experience" conference.TRANSCRIPT
ANDREA @RESMINI
GHOST IN THE MACHINETHE ARCHITECTURE OF INFORMATION SPACES
UX POLAND 2014
Last summer I flew Qatar Airways all the way to Melbourne, to speak at UX Australia: a long 24hour haul across most of the globe that took me first from Copenhagen to Doha, Qatar, where the company has their main hub. We had our wheels down around 10:00pm local time in 40 degrees heat and I was off for Melbourne a couple of hours later. The trip was comfortable, uneventful, positively unremarkable. The major thrill being how to avoid to spill chicken pomodoro all over my pants and shirt. I failed, if you really want to know.
My boarding passes were remarkable tho. They came in a brightly colored yellow folder, with instructions to have them visible and handy when leaving the plane in Doha.While we have become generally good at managing the large amounts of information we have to move around to make commercial flying a sensible proposition, flight connections can be tricky, and Doha is not only an entry point to Qatar, but also a 21millionpassengersperyear exchange point for many who travel East or West.A complex choreography moves travelers from one flight all the way to to their next connections. With such numbers, staying on time, avoiding potentially disruptive mistakes and keeping customers happy is not an easy feat.
..
All signage within Doha airport is routinely bilingual, using Arabic and English and working swell. Still, the major friction point travelers encounter comes before even entering the terminals.
URBANROMANCEONLINE.COM
Travelers move between planes and terminals on buses, and airport buses are not the best of places for signagespotting. Paying attention to detailed explanations is difficult as well: we are tired, we are distracted, we are irritable after hours of immobility tortured by uncomfortable plane seats.We also might not know what we have to look out for, or simply care in the least. “I’ll mind my business, sooner or later someone will take care of me and move me where I have to be”. Buses in Doha make it even worse, as all windows are darkened to prevent overheating. Being on the lookout might be difficult, impractical, or plain impossible if you are standing mid of the bus. Usually trying to prevent someone else’s solidsteel backpack buckles to mark you with possibly interesting but absolutely impractical permanent scars takes most of our attention.
So Qatar Airways devised a simple solution to help people move around the airport that works pretty well because it is implemented systemically and because it begins way before you get to Doha: you start to learn about your terminal and what you have to do on the ground when you checkin and you either print or receive your boarding passes.If you are printing your pass home, you get a standard A4 page sporting a very evident colorcoded area: yellow, blue, or green. If you checkin at the airport or drop your baggage, you will receive standard passes in a similarly colorcoded folder, and coordinated tags for any hand luggage you might carry.
Same thing on the website. These colors correspond to the different terminals and activities involved with your trip when you hit Doha: yellow is for transfers, green is for shortrange transfers between planes, blue is for people entering Qatar. Business class is handled separately and colorcoded purple.
When the plane begins its descent into Doha, you get a reminder. A video details what is going to happen, and how the folder containing the boarding passes (or the passes themselves) is going to be an important element of identification. You are repeatedly told to keep it visible, and the tags on your bags reinforce these visual clues: not only they allow you to know what is your color, and what group you belong to (a strong, nofuss message: if unsure, flock. Stay with your color), but they allow airport personnel to catch the occasionally straying or unaware bird before anything potentially disruptive happens.When on the bus, a recorded message plays in the background reminding you of how the system works. At this point it’s visual, aural, and using every means to get to you.
DOHA AIRPORT
When you arrive at the terminal, you find out that this colorcoding is applied to the building themselves and that staff awaits at the doors waving facsimiles of the right boarding pass for that stop, and that they actively check that nobody who should be getting off the bus remains onboard.
If you exclude the video played in flight, most of the technology involved here amounts to “paint something in different colors, explain people why, and stick to it”. But the basic value of consistency and of delivering an unequivocal message that does not rely (only) on any spoken language cannot be stressed enough.In all, this is a brilliant information architecture deployed across many different channels through a number of touchpoints, systemically.
There's layer upon layer of possible choices and paths intersecting at each nodal point.
A TAXONOMY OF TOUCHPOINTS, WITH A NOD TO P. MORVILLE
Products today are services. This is not really news: I wrote about this ongoing transformation together with Luca Rosati in 2009, and Don Norman, who sure has much more clout than us when it comes to user experience, wrote a similar piece for Interaction in the same year by the title “Systems Thinking – A Product is More than the Product”. And honestly, we weren’t really saying anything new at the time either. But the trend is keeping up, steadily, and it’s worth a little attention: products are services, and those which are not are turning fast.
Even those who might seem at first to be reasonably immune to this epidemics, think your favorite cereals, are really not. They are pieces of a complex machinery, an ecology of products where every single element is a gear of a larger system.A few months ago, Ferrero, the Italian brand that produces Nutella, went through a social media hailstorm.
SARA ROSSO
They suddenly decided they wanted a longtime selfdeclared Nutella fan, American journalist Sara Rosso, to stop organizing World Nutella Day, a fansofNutella conference she had been hosting since 2007. As soon as the news hit the Internet, outrage got rampant.
In a matter of days the online backlash became was so fierce that Ferrero retreated quickly and generously changed their minds, allowing Ms Rosso to continue spreading (literally) her passion for years to come.
BRAND
BRAND
MEDIA
STRATEGY
BRAND
PRODUCT
CUSTOMERS
SOCIAL
MEDIA
This is still an ecosystem. An open, participated ecosystem. Ferrero just didn't see it and suffered the consequences. The change is of course much more evident where products lend themselves more easily to such a systemic change. The entertainment industry is a case in point.
Products are services, but it does not end there: users, customers, consumers, actors, you choose the name, are also cocreators. They are wranglers, as Bruce Sterling called them back then in 2005 in his “Shaping Things”: actively remixing, creating and harvesting content and meanings. Facebook and FourSquare are only possible because we provide the goods that they use to fill up their empty shelves and scaffolding.
THE WALKING DEAD COMICS
(The Walking Dead as an example of a recent, crossmedial franchise. Originally a comic book series by Robert Kirkman, it spawned a successful multiseason tv series, interlaced videogames, and plenty of zombie merchandise.)
THE WALKING DEAD TV SHOW
THE WALKING DEAD VIDEO GAME
THE WALKING DEAD MERCHANDISE
Narratives do not seat easily within one channel.Through these continuous narrative, services become experiences. Now, if you are thinking this is nothing that should interest anyone with a design or business perspective, nothing that really matters much in the grand scheme of things, you’re missing the point. Services is where the money is going to be. You also have probably not paid the necessary attention to said entertainment industry, of late.
Like, say, GTA V, a videogame by multinational company Rockstar Games ...
... making $800 million in 24 hours. That's more than most Hollywood blockbusters, right? (And those are still entertainment, aren't they?)
JANIS JOPLIN
Now, you might not be interested in games anyway. You might also have decided that music really died with Janis Joplin. If that is the case, you are probably in the wrong line of business, trust me. But here's a little story.
WIKIPEDIA
I do have a little collection of vinyl LPs in the house. Whenever my teenage daughter brings in friends, they have a laugh at them. Not surprising, right?
Old man in the house, right. But the interesting part is that they laugh at the CDs as well. I asked, and I was told that yes one might be black and larger and the other one smaller and silvery, but they are really the same thing. Boring. Old. Not needed. Music is immaterial, comes in links, pokes, shares. It's in Spotify, Pandora, a friend's playlist on Youtube. It's a service you access from a mountain top and not certainly something you buy spread over a thin plastic wafer.
Music is an experience.
Products are experiences.
Now, if you buy music, what is that you are buying, where exactly is your money going today: to your tablets or smartphones? That wouldn't be much of an innovation, would it? We already had this.
It was called the Sony Walkman. A personal device you could use to carry around your music. You are not really buying this.
DEVICE
BRAND
PRODUCERS
MUSIC
DEVICE
SOCIAL
MEDIA
DEVICE
CONSUMERS
What you are putting your money into is the service that allows you to get that song through the store through the application to your devices. Compatible with crazy DRM regulations and general greediness, all of them.Smartphones, tablets, mp3 players.Music is a service, an experience. Value does not reside within the song itself (after all, I could probably get it for free somewhere else), but in the service I receive, and that includes quite a lot of moving parts that have nothing to do with the company I’m dealing with. For example, recommendations from other users, or, in the case of Nutella, Ms Rosso.
What is driving behavior change is not an artifact, but the ecosystem, the architecture behind the artifact.
These changes bring along a certain uneasiness. It's the uneasiness that comes with the visible shift from authorship to conversations, from central control to remediation, the alternate and complementary strategies of dismissal or denouncing as a threat, and the impact this has on society.From Google is making us stoopid on the Atlantic ...
... to economic disruption and chaos on the Huffington Post, ...
... all the way to denouncing the cult of the amateur that is supposedly killing our culture.
ANIMAL COPS: HOUSTON
If you think this is some kind of bad news, consider that within the realm of traditional media this is what gave us reality tv.These narratives, literary in nature and quality or not it really does not matter, are only possible in a scenario which is radically different from the previous authorial context. The radical change is the absence of authors. Think Facebook, the billion individual voices becoming Facebook. Texts are not merely observed. Texts do not last asis very long either: they are located within the space of participation and continuously reinvented.
BREAKING AMISH
This is not necessarily a good thing, and while some of us might find “Animal Cops Houston” mildly entertaining, “Breaking Amish” has substantially fewer redeeming qualities in my book.
Let's not even mention the phenomenon of Russian car cameras, right? Still, can we just close our eyes and make these go away? Or dismiss them as “bad”?
DAVID BYRNE
This vibe, this refusal, is clearly discernible in David Byrne’s recent piece for the Guardian on how the Internet (better, music streaming services) will be the death of music. Byrne is honest. He paints a dire picture in which the Spotifys and Pandoras of the world will in the long run force musicians to find some other jobs, but states also that he has no solution to offer. Still, Byrne doesn’t seem to see the tide coming. What he really means there is that streaming seems to suggest to him we are approaching the death of music as we know it, that is, a specific business model for music production and consumption, and the one that Byrne has interacted with for the length of his career. He just happens to think this is the harbinger of doom, which is legitimate, but a trifle shortsighted.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/16801915@N06/5982168522/ READING TOM - SUN STUDIO, MEMPHIS
There is nothing necessary in the idea of the recording industry as it is. Rather, its business model is a legitimate product of the 20th century and its industrial processes: streaming services are simply early instantiations of different business models, more in tune with this century.
Both labels and artists will have to either adjust (or adjust the process), or they will definitely be out of work. It’s not going to be the first time that something like that happens: let me tell you that scribes were not that happy about the printing press, and neither were blacksmiths when bicycles came along. It seems we still read books. And last time I checked horses are still around. Scribes, on the other hand, are hard to find and paid their weight in gold.
HTTP://WWW.FOTOPEDIA.COM/ITEMS/FLICKR-3601549032
It's like observing New York from the top of a skyscraper. You only see streets and walls and boundaries, the structure placed there to constrain, but you don't see the crowd freely crisscrossing their individual paths through the city. Where others see a thriving multitude of voices, they see abysmal dumbness and panoptical surveillance. Which of course are there, both the dumbness and the risk of surveillance. Twitter is a human artifact, certainly no different than anything else.But it makes little sense to argue with the David Byrnes of the world. In tactical terms, they are right. Shortsighted, but right. Twitter does not make sense if my perspective is shaped and informed by the filter first, publish second lens of traditional authorship. Streaming is impacting individual sales of songs. So did the phonograph, right? Some jobs could go extinct, or end up somewhere in the shallowest parts of the long tail, which might not be a bad thing at all. But music does not mean record labels.
All this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned, or vigilant, that we shouldn’t design better processes or work out socially acceptable compromises, it's just that the second coming of Cthulhu is still a few years off.These processes are nothing new. If you consider the bicycle, it went through a very similar cycle of elitism, disruption, and acceptance. A very nonlinear process, I might add.The aptly named bone crusher you see here was the first thing resembling a bike. From here, we don't have a steady series of improvements along a winning line, but rather a delta of many different tentatives, obeying different societal and cultural imperatives.
PAPHOTOS.CO.UK
Highwheelers or pennyfarthings were not allpurpose machines. They thrived around a subculture that valued risk, velocity, and broken bones.These were very dangerous contraptions from which falling with catastrophic results was too easy. They were mostly used by young men trying to impress young women through their riding skills, or for competitions. Think of skateboarders, or freeclimbers, or freedivers, and you'll have suitable examples of what it meant to be riding one of these.Women and respectable adults were not supposed to be using them.
When cultural and social norms started to change around the bicycle, the most bizarre solutions emerged to allow their use and make them safer and more proper.
FRIESE JOHN F. - FARM BLACKSMITHING – THE-SAVOISIEN.COM
This was a long, contrived process with plenty of deadends, and with unexpected enemies. Blacksmiths were fiercely opposing the bike: after all, it was an industrial artifact that was bound to take horses off the streets, right? Byrne would understand.
Unfortunately, all radical innovation is systemic and disruptive. It changes the playfield.
In strategic terms, this is a huge part of this paradigmatic shift: a disruptive move not only from products to services and experiences, ...
FROM AUTHORS TO CONVERSATIONS
HTTP://WWW.FOTOPEDIA.COM/ITEMS/FLICKR-613445810
... but from authors to conversations.
And while it's easy to embrace the cynical side of things and dismiss the selfreferential echo chambers that very often social media for example represent, ...
... Facebook is still commanding enough attention that arguably one of the most powerful offices in the world, that of US President Barack Obama, needs to have a presence there.
Recent european statistics place the average European citizen online for some 25.9 hours per week. These hours are by and large not spent in front of a computer in the office, battling spreadsheets or typing away: they are spent checking mail and chatting on smartphones, watching videos on tablets while comfortably sitting on a sofa, engaging friends and perfect strangers in online gaming, or following up the latest meme on social media.
We still approach what we do and the design of information spaces as we used to do 20 years ago. Like ghosts in a machine, our body in front of a screen and our mind projected beyond that screen.
COMPUTER ROOM, SANTA BARBARA – HTTP://IS.GD/H4ME67
We used to do computing at a desk, in the office, or in the home.
When you were done, you switched it off and you left all of cyberspace behind. There was closure, and clear separation.
Now it's not that way anymore. The ghost and the machine are one, and we compute constantly, personally, through mobile phones ...
TANZEN80, HTTP://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/TANZEN80/6140025125/
... portable gaming ...
... real time displays ...
... kiosks ...
CASHIER?
... and ambient appliances.
Activities and artifacts merge in complex experiences.If there’s any take away from the World Nutella Day debacle, is that services turn products into some common property of sorts that can be easily remixed, remediated, and manipulated in ways the original producers most surely didn’t think of. Everything that can be connected will be: everything that will be connected will be part of an experience residing largely out of the corporate control we normally assume a company has over its offerings.
I want you to stop one second here. The point is not just that we are jacked in into cyberspace all of the time, without the fun of zerogravity kung fu: there is a subtler but much more momentous change happening here. Our perception of digital and physical is changing because of this. Our perception of the boundaries between the two is shifting. Our perception of the very existence of a boundary is getting blurrier by the minute. Computers, places, and people are on the same side of the mirror, and they are all connected.
INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE
THEGOODNEIGHBORHOOD.COM
Something we used to do only in physical space ...
... now we do in digital.
Still, we care for music. This is a postdigital world of crosschannel experiences.
You might think Facebook is an app in your phone.
Or a real place somewhere in California.
Or people working on all sorts of ways to turn you and your personal info into more ads and money
Or your friends, maybe. I don't know these people, btw.
What it really is is the bad pub in your neighborhood. Bad beer, uncomfy chairs, the owner tries to cheat. But all your friends are there, so you just go there. For the stories, for the narratives.
Take late Millennials for example, those who haven’t yet hit adulthood and who have little or no memory of a world without the Internet as they were too small, and Generation Z kids, those born after the year 2000 and who actually didn’t get to see how it was before: the Telegraph reported last summer that when on holiday they still manage to spend roughly two hours a day on social media, connecting back with friends, sharing the high and lows of their vacation, liking and plussing and favoriting.In a most comprehensive study conducted in the USA, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported a substantial increase of the time spent consuming media in kids between the ages 8 and 18 between 1999 and 2009. What is most interesting is not the 7+ hours a day spent on TV, games, music, and social media, but the fact that while TV time shrinks constantly, interactive digital content keeps going up. Even music, still a major player, means largely iPods, Spotify, or YouTube to this demographic, with a large component of consumption being reliant on social mechanisms and personal, multiple devices.
These, Millennials and Generation Zers, are the people you often see dubbed “digital natives” following a seminal article written by Marc Prensky in 2001, implying they were born into a world where digital technology was readily available from the get go, and hence possess a native understanding of it.But so much in this conversations in the mainstream news seems to be misaligned, either calling up to the end of the world by social media or praising superior skills that are not really there. To me, it seems we are constantly missing the major point: there are definitely signs of the emergence of what Clive Thompson calls in a wellwritten piece on the Guardian “a new teenage sphere that is conducted digitally”.
ADAPTED FROM WÄLJAS, M., SEGERSTÅHL, K., VÄÄNÄNEN-VAINIO-MATTILA, K. & OINAS-KUKKONEN, H. (2010). CROSS-PLATFORM SERVICE USER EXPERIENCE
The only thing, it’s not digital for them. It’s not “virtual” (a note here: can we retire this word, please? We retired grunge, right? Virtual calls up more or less that same Seattle garage imagery. Let’s. Please.). It’s not different, or alien. This is what being “native” amounts to, and what Prensky outlined in his article back then.
It's a smooth move into a world of crosschannel activities that span the digital and the physical with little distinction between the two.
ADAPTED FROM WÄLJAS, M., SEGERSTÅHL, K., VÄÄNÄNEN-VAINIO-MATTILA, K. & OINAS-KUKKONEN, H. (2010). CROSS-PLATFORM SERVICE USER EXPERIENCE
ECOSYSTEMS
Where services sit at the intersection of many different, selfcentered ecosystems.As such, this being digital has very little to do with competencies, or with being geeks, or with technical skills.Technology is fun, liberating, but also part of the fabric of reality, just like bikes or footballs. We could easily say the same for every generation: we would just have to use a different technology. My grandmother grokked electricity and what it could do for her in a way her farmer parents who were born in a world of oil and candles couldn’t, and I had to explain TV to her more than once as a kid even though she’d been seeing it for some 20 years at the time.
But using really does not equate mastering, in the larger possible sense of the word. Technical, personal, social mastering. It shouldn’t be even implied. I could explain TV to my grandma, but that didn’t make me capable of broadcasting my own show. Or of making a successful one, for that matter. Similarly, digital natives are immersed in digital, but that doesn’t make them great hackers or Internet experts from the day they are born. That takes time if it happens at all, and a learning process, which should really be no surprise.What being a digital native means is that digital technology (though I would argue connectivity is the key element and the key differentiator here for real) is simply a part of everyday life. There is no reconversion, there is no updating of predigital analogies, no idea that “mail is like writing a letter, but a bit less formal”, or that “songs are really pieces of that thing we call a CD or LP”. In this sense, they are much more digital naives that do things naturally, almost unaware, rather than digital natives.
What is different is not the fact that digital na(t)ives have an innate understanding of how the Internet works (they don’t), that they can finetune your iPhone (they can’t), or that they should be listened to when it comes to trends in the industry (they shouldn’t). They are simply not considering digital as something different from real. No Millennial business owner will ever pause for a moment to consider if they should invest time money or energies in this Web thing we have. No Generation Z customer will assume that live chat you offer to clients is really just there for show and that you have to ring up customer care during office hours.It is a huge shift with profound implications, some of them connected to the crosschannel nature of any service that is provided or will be provided to this demographic. These people, they see things in different ways, to put it as Bruce Springsteen put it in 1977.What changes can we expect? What changes should be design for? What will they expect, or desire, when interacting with the tax system? What will be feasible communication channels? Will any hospital ward better have a Whatsapp account? Should they?
CHESS, MUFFET (http://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/5347237755/)
Let me conclude with a question to you all. Suppose we wanted to play chess. Could we play chess right here right now?
MSPAFORUM.COM
I suppose we could. If anyone has pen and paper we could create our own board and pieces, right? Any other idea? (someone says “on a computer”)Right. Or a phone. And what about ...
MONSELICE (HTTP://EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG/WIKI/FILE:MONSELICE_Z18.JPG)
.. saying you all on the right are the white pieces and you on the left the black pieces? Line you all up, and then call out bishop in G4 and so on?
CHESS IN HARRY POTTER
We could take it further if we had magic of course, but let's stick to being plausible. Why could we do all this?
After all, the interfaces and interactions we just described vary wildy. Picking up a marble piece on a chess board to move it is a totally different thing from shouting “H2!” and seeing people squirrel across the room, let alone trying to grab Mr Parks here and carry him from A2 to B4. Right?
The thing is, what would be in place would be the architecture of chess. Its rules.
While the interfaces would change, the rules wouldn't. That's why we could play a game of chess here, now.
That's why I urge you to work on the system, the architectures, and consider that you are providing the rules for structuring conversations, between people and artifacts, people and systems, and people and other people, that happen in a postdigital world, where digital and physical are becoming one and no one cares for any difference there might be between the two.Make the rules visible, you will make them actionable.
Be agents of change: rather than worry about the shade of lipstick it’s wearing ...
RETHINK THE PIG
... just rethink the pig altogether.
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