Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [45]
One of the first things they cited happened to be a feature of the hallway right outside their offices: artist Natalie Jeremijenko's installation Live Wire (also known as Dangling String). This was an "eight-foot piece of plastic spaghetti" attached to an electric motor mounted in the ceiling that was itself wired into the building's ethernet. Fluctuations in network traffic ran the motor, causing the string to oscillate visibly and audibly.
When traffic was low, Live Wire remained largely inert, but when activity surged, it would spring to life in such a way that it could both be seen by hallway passers-by and heard throughout the suite of nearby offices. you might not even be consciously aware of it—you would just, somewhere in the back of your mind, register the fact that traffic was spiking. Jeremijenko's approach and the results it garnered were true to everything Brown and Weiser had speculated about the periphery.
Despite its success, this was the last anyone heard of calm technology for quite a few years; the cause wasn't taken up again until the late 1990s, when a company called Ambient Devices offered for sale something it called the Ambient Orb. The Orb was a milky globe maybe ten centimeters in diameter that communicated with a proprietary wireless network, independent of the Internet. It was supposed to sit atop a desk or a night table and use gentle modulations of color to indicate changes in some user-specified quantity, from the weather (color mapped to temperature, with the frequency of pulses indicating likelihood of precipitation) to commute traffic (green for smooth sailing, all the way through to red for "incident").
These examples are certainly more relevant to the way life is actually lived—more actionable—than a simple index of bits flowing through a network. But what if the information you're interested in is still more complex and multidimensional than that, such as the source, amount, and importance of messages piling up in your email inbox?
London-based designer/makers Jack Schulze and Matt Webb, working for Nokia, have devised a presentation called Attention Fader that addresses just this situation. It's a framed picture, the kind of thing you might find hanging on the side wall of an office cubicle, that appears at first glance to be a rather banal and uninflected portrait of a building along the south bank of the Thames.
But the building has a lawn before it, and a swath of sky above it, and there's a section of pathway running past, along the river embankment, and Schulze and Webb have used each of these as subtle channels for the display of useful information. Leave town for a few days, let your in-box fill up, and the number of people gaggling on the river path will slowly mount. Ignore a few high-priority messages, and first cars, then trucks, and finally tanks pull up onto the lawn; let the whole thing go, and after a while some rather malevolent-looking birds begin to circle in the sky.
But subtly, subtly. None of the crowds or trucks or birds is animated; they fade into the scene with such tact that it's difficult to say just when they arrive. It's precisely the image's apparent banality that is key to its success as a peripheral interface; it's neither loud, nor colorful, nor attention-grabbing in any obvious way. It is, rather, the kind of thing you glance up at from time to time, half-consciously, to let its message seep into your awareness. Those who see the picture at infrequent intervals mightn't notice anything but a London street scene.
Schulze and Webb's project is a paragon of encalming technology. It points clearly to a world in which the widespread deployment of information-processing resources in the environment paradoxically helps to reduce the user's sense of being overwhelmed by data. To invert Mies, here more