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Heft

Back to Heidegger: that tools which are ‘ready to hand’ (zuhanden) disappear into the task, and only become again ‘tools’ to us (as being, in themselves, things) when we put them down. I’ve written before, wondering about tools which we never put down — the tools which once we start using them, are internalised into our augmented experience — tools which become so much a part of our embodied being that we can never see them again in their own thingness. The word, not the axe. Also, possibly, pervasive tools like the mobile phone, certainly the internet, for some of …

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Matt Webb’s Glancing Software

Matt’s been working on some glanceware (independently of what we’re doing here). At the moment it’s a simple way of seeing very basic presence information about a group of friends, whcih sits in the taskbar of your screen. He believes, if I understand correctly, that peripherally-attended presence is the seed on which can grow the pearl of complex social interaction. I’m interested to see where this leads: I think he’s following a similar train of thought to the audible presence cues in Hubbub, although personally I prefer the idea of audio cues, as they don’t require screen-based attention for them …

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Glanceful Kunstkopf?

Thinking more about glanceful interfaces, and the communication of complex multivariate datasets. For reasons I haven’t gotten around to writing about here yet, I’m veering towards sound cues for a lot of things, particularly binaurally-located vocal cues. I’m looking for a pipelining spatialiser using some simple head-related transfer function (HRTF) that I can feed audio into at approximately realtime. For ‘earcons’, simple samples are easy. For vocal cues, I’m thinking of using FESTIVAL. But I need the spatialiser, and I can’t find one that runs on Linux and accepts a stream input. Maybe I’ll have to hack something in Max. …

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Subliminal Feeds

A question for glanceware practitioners: how to convey multivariate, multistate data at a glance. You have to choose media which we are very good at parsing at a glance. Chernoff faces were an early attempt at this. I guess music would be another good medium to explore. We want users to know things without necessarily knowing how they know, or when they were informed. At one level, glanceware should make knowledge transfer subliminal. Which itself raises the question of when and why we need to convey quantitative or qualitative information. Imagine a glanceware system to monitor a stock portfolio. Do …

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A Glance at Heidegger

Heidegger makes the distinction between tools with are ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden) and those which are ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden). We are, he says, only conscious of tools as tools when they are present-at-hand. When we are actively engaged in performing a task through use of the tool, we lose consciouness of the tool itself, which ‘withdraws’ into the task. The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all… The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the …

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The Accursed (Samba) Share

Ben emailed me to ask me something about the provenance of some of my Discreet Computing stuff, which led me to thinking (although I don’t think I’ve answered his question yet): “There’s probably a riff to be done on how current tech burns away attention because of some link with the conspicuously consumptive assumptions of the business world — damn it I have 10,000 people in back offices staring at screens, and my machines are sucking the attention of that many minds, therefore I must be successful…” In fact that might be the way in — computers (used the way …

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Riley on The Glance

(Quoted in the July 2003 World of Interiors (p.119)): Don’t look at it — just glance! Sometimes in a mere glance one can see more than in the close scrutiny of a thousand details.

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Andy Clark on Embodiment

Somewhat close to a joke isn’t it. You say to someone you know, do you know the time, and they say yes. And then they look at their watch. You can sort of challenge them well, did you really know the time when you said yes? They’ll say “yeah, I knew how to get the time” and I think that’s often what we do mean when we say yes, we know things, we know how to get them from our long term memory, from some reliable environmental resource, from wherever. The artist’s sketch pad is kind of more interesting I …

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Alan Kay at Etcon

Be inspired: Alan Kay at Etcon this year… We should think about children. The printing revoltuion didn’t happen in Gutenberg’s day, it happened 150 years later, long after Gutenberg was dead,when all the people alive had grown up with the press. A small minority of Gutenberg’s contemporaries *got* the printing press, but it wasn’t until they were dead that the children who grew up with the press were able to put the ideas into practice […] This stuff is better than anything in our handhelds today. We could implement it from they papers they wrote then, but no one reads …

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Discreet/Social Media

Discreet/Social Media