purple motes

Device design is a significant problem for a show-and-tell communicator. Designing a “phone” that integrates talking and showing would be a useful project for a design school class.

Re-describing features is less costly than redesigning devices. Speaker phones are used for long, boring meetings. But a social mode is just what teenagers need. That’s right kids, just press that button and you and the friend that’s permanently attached to your hip can both talk at the same time with another friend and see and share pictures on your phone at the same time, too.

Put your phone on social mode and you all can talk and see! Who cares if you talk a little louder and adults around you can hear you? That’s their problem. Plus, they’re stupid so they won’t understand what you’re talking about anyway. Privacy? That’s for uptight geezers!

A show-and-tell social mode probably would be a lot more valuable to most mobile phone users than being able to use your Nokia N73 to take and upload photos to Flickr. Martin and his daughter could use it when communicating with Nana. The 78% of Swedish broadband customers who want to use a webcam on Christmas Eve probably would like to be able to do a “group call.” And they would probably rather not have to do it crowding around their desktop computer, wherever that’s located.

Communication devices need to move on from the design of phones. Recognizing that not all interpersonal communication is one-to-one would be a propitious place to start.

2 Comments

While human brains and computers are often considered to be general purpose technologies, like any real technology, brains and computers have physical structures and operating designs that generate constraints and imply trade-offs across tasks. A computer program cannot easily read an image containing distorted text, but a human can. Thus requiring blog commenters to pass a CAPTCHA lessens automated blog comment spam.

Distributing computing between humans and computers is an important aspect of efficient problem-solving. Amazon's Mechanical Turk provides a general marketplace for distributing computation to persons. Luis von Ahn is designing games for humans that produce both fun play and symbolic work that computers perform relatively badly. Some examples are the ESP Game, which generates image labels, and Peekaboom, which generates descriptions of objects within an image.

Sensory form is an aspect of distributing computing between humans and computers. Consider, for example, women-oriented social drama programming. Prior to the widespread availability of television, such radio programming was highly popular. This type of program shifted almost completely to television when television became widely available. With the exception of sensory modes, the radio and television programs were formally quite similar stimuli. Why did persons prefer the audio-visual mode (television) over the audio-only mode (radio)? A plausible explanation, it seems to me, is that the bodily cost of making sense of conventional drama via the audio-visual experience of television is less than that of making sense of the same drama presented solely through the audio channel of radio. Put differently, image computation was shifted from persons to television studios.

The Internet, by connecting huge numbers of persons and computers, enables a tremendous possibilities for distributing computing among persons and computers. Tim O'Reilly declares:

As the symbiosis between humans and computers becomes deeper, and at a larger scale, we're going to see problems that were formerly construed as "hard AI" suddenly broken, not because computers themselves have become intelligent, but because humans and computers have gotten better at working together.

Getting humans and computers to work together better requires more thinking about what computers do well, and what humans want to do, and do well.

1 Comment