As the summer is coming to a close, I’ve finished reading two books that I’ve been chipping away at since the beginning. One is Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold and the other is Everyware by Adam Greenfield. They are both surveys of current technology and the possibilities for the near future.

Smart Mobs
This book, while it varies a lot, is mostly about mobility, networks, people and what is happening with all that. It’s a look at what happens when people as a group interact with technology, what we have done with it, and what we will be facing in the future. It dips into a lot of philosophical discussion and talk of ubicomp.

Everyware
Similar to Smart Mobs, it’s talking about the future, but the focus is more on technology that we are using and will use in our daily life. It’s a very good overview of recent research and ideas that are out there, with a greater sense of urgency than Smart Mobs. As a designer himself, Adam Greenfield takes a stab at some initial principles.

Smart Mobs using Everyware
The books are similar enough that I have trouble distinguishing my thoughts about them. Both of the authors call themselves futurists, and spend most of the time talking about the future state of things as derived from current technology and intentions by research groups and companies.

The most valuable thing I’ve gotten from both of them is a deep pool of resources that they bring up. They both bring up a lot of philosophical trains of thought, researchers, manifestos, and books that help to understand what’s around the corner. I think it’s great because a lot of them are confirming stuff that we already learned like Goffman’s various writings on the presentation of self.

 They also bring up and explain technologies that are enabling new ways of interacting with each other that we don’t really have time to cover in school. Knowing about what is going to happen with data networks and embedded technology will probably help to ground design ideas a little better

The other thing I liked about both books is the balanced approach they take. They are cautiously embracing the new, which is probably a healthy thing to do. They bounce back and forth, describing utopias and dystopias of the future. Both authors really want to preserve human dignity and use new technology to benefit us rather than just because we can, much like we are taught throughout school.

There is a strong sense of urgency in both of the books. They are talking about the inevitable and we have to be prepared to deal with complex situations that are very different from what we are used to. I think their sense of urgency is already being answered through user-centered design, I hope.

Not to go on too long, but I think both of these books are important for designers of all kinds, especially with mobility where it’s at today. I have heard lots of people distance themselves from anything technical because of the connotation that interaction design already has, but I’ll reserve my thoughts on that for later.

Criticism?
I don’t have anything that critical to say about the books. To people who are already familiar with this stuff, the books might not be so useful. For designers, they don’t offer many answers, but mostly questions and considerations we need to understand.

Smart Mobs came out in 2002 and Everyware in 2006, so sometimes it feels like Adam Greenfield is simply updating the state of things with his book. Smart Mobs takes a very massive approach and covers a lot of different topics, whereas Everyware is a little more focused and organized in bite-sized chunks. In terms of a knowledge resource, I found Smart Mobs to be a little deeper, and I plan on actually buying it just to reference. There are a lot of great quotes and references. There’s also the Smart Mobs blog which updates with news relevant to stuff that is talked about in the book. It’s a shame Everyware doesn’t have something similar, unless I missed it. Either way, both were well worth it, and are easily skimmable.

PS. No, I haven’t started reading for my thesis project yet.

Social Proprioception
Speaking of monitoring what people are doing, there has been a lot of talk recently about micro-blogging, especially in the form of twitter. Essentially they are ways of people leaving traces of their lives online with little effort. There was an article in wired about a month ago talking about it and why they are useful:

“It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.”

It’s an interesting description of it, and justification for why twitter-related stuff might be around for a while. I’ve been trying out the different ways of doing it, and I don’t know if I’ve found something satisfying yet. I kind of stumbled into doing it on Facebook. I used to just send people links and videos through email or IM, but posting it on Facebook was a more passive way to share without bugging people. It was up to them to click on something if they were bored.

Too many accounts
By way of doing research for various projects I forced myself to sign up for things like Twitter, Jaiku, and Tumblr just to see what they were all about. Twitter is nice and simple, but won’t work on the phone I have free texting. Jaiku is great because you can import feeds from anywhere into your own feed. It tends to clog things up a bit, especially if you are bringing in Last.fm or a news site. It also limits what you can see in one post, so images and videos are just links, which is good in some respects. Unfortunately I forgot the password for the Jaiku account that had my phone linked to it, so I had to start a new account and my phone number is “in use by another account” that I can’t get into.

So that leaves me with tumblr. I like it because it’s a little more focused on showing the actual content. So when I post a photo or video it is shown. It’s essentially a lightweight blog that makes it easy to just throw your content into it and also allow for feeds to be imported. Because of this, it’s a little less focused on the “social” part of micro-blogging.

In the end, I really wonder what will become of these sites. The link to mobile is what I think will keep them afloat for a while. It was very liberating to be able to snap random pictures and have them sent directly to a new post (although using way too many button presses). I don’t know if the average person has a need to use them or if they just aren’t aware of them. Maybe the younger generations that will see the usefulness in the same way that they gobble up Facebook and MySpace features.

Infinite Loop
One last point, when I was signing up for these, the idea of being able to clog these micro-blogging sites with feeds from anywhere was kind of ridiculous to me, so I tried an experiment. Just like you might put one mirror in front of another, I fed a tumblr feed into jaiku and a jaiku feed into tumblr to see what would happen. At first, nothing, but when I pulled in a third feed (it was randomly Herbert’s flickr stream) it started echoing forever. It’s kind of a play on the idea of people updating these things constantly and automatically.

Now that I’ve been using this feed aggregator for a while, and I can see all my relevant feeds in one place in an organized categorized way, I’m starting to see some of its issues.

First, the main benefit has been for news sites. For general news, tech news, and mobile news I can just go to one page and scan it to get a sense of what is going on in the world. It works out great, since most of them have descriptive titles. It works with design-related sites to a certain extent, but it can still get overwhelming.

It doesn’t work with certain sites like boing boing or WMMNA because I might read a story posted because of interesting pictures or follow-ups from other people. It’s just a much more enjoyable experience to actually be at the site scrolling through things rather than always be in the same netvibes interface. There is a lot more stimulation and possible follow up links when you actually make it to the sites. Not to mention, a lot of cultural or design sites don’t have the most descriptive titles for posts.

So I guess what I’m realizing is that feeds are best used for monitoring sites that tell you “what is going on” whether with world news, business, politics, or the people you know rather than monitoring “what is being said/created” in the form content.