I’m no longer blogging here. I haven’t the attention span.

Instead, I have a tumblelog on the splendid tumblr service.

I do not suggest that you follow me on rss unless you can cope with lots of frequent,  tiny, updates. Such is the way of a tumblelog.

On the other hand, if you have the need for a rapid-fire outlet of the “I saw this and it’s awesome” type, I highly recommend tumblr.

At the beginning of the year, the Tata Nano was launched with much fanfare. It’s a small, one-box, rear engined “people’s car”.

The basic design has more than a passing resembalance to the Smart/Mercedes forTwo which is also rear-engined. It’s safe to say that the Smart’s haven’t exactly changed the world. And let’s not forget the (in)famous Smart forTwo “moose test” rollover. Of course a rollover is almost inevitable if you have a high, narrow car and fling it about.

Some people have compared the Nano to other great city cars (as opposed to people’s cars) of the past, particular the Mini and the Fiat 500 or, more accurately, to the new Mini and new 500 — modern incarnations which are sad parodies of city cars. The modern “Mini” is too big to be a proper city car and is really a sort of upright sporty hatchback. The 500, at least, is quite small (apparently, as they’re not on-sale in Oz) but so are non-retro things like Toyota’s Yaris.

A better comparison of the Nano to other cars would be to great people’s cars of the past, which are simpler than the Mini and 500, and intended for a population making the transition to cars. Even more particularly cars designed for sub-optimal roads should be sought out. To find small, affordable, cars designed for poor roads you need to look to Europe just after WWII. I’m thinking of three cars, the Volkswagen Beetle, the Citroen 2CV and the Renault 4.

The Beetle

(Injured Beetle by extranoise)

The Beetle (nb: it was never officially the Beetle, until the “New Beetle” came along, a poor parody of the original) was not really intended for use of poor roads. Hitler commissioned it before the War for use on the new Autobahn system with the brief that it be able to carry a family of four at 100km/h. Pre-1940, that was ambitious. Ferry Porsche decided that the most efficient means of packaging four people and an engine was with a horizontally-opposed rear-engined two-and-a-half box sort of arrangement. The Beetle is a whimsical shell to wrap that particular style of mechanics in, given that the much more conventional, though less successful, Type 3 had the same basic mechanical layout under conventional three-box sedan, notchback and wagon designs. That the same basic layout is still used in the more expensive Porsches is triumph of nostalgia over sense and of engineering over physics.

The Beetle, though, isn’t really designed for poor roads, rally use and dune-buggies notwithstanding. A Beetle doesn’t have a great deal of ground clearance, and with the engine hanging out behind the back axle, it’s vulnerable to damage. And don’t forget the early Beetle’s swing-axle rear suspension which has a tendency to tuck under the car during forward weight transfer, resulting in always unwelcome, occaisionally disasterous, nigh-unrecoverable lift-off oversteer.

Engineering “people’s cars” which are inherrently dangerous should be sternly frowned upon.The plus points for the Beetle are that it was pretty simple, it was cheap and it had great marketing.

The Citroen 2CV

(Pimp my Ride by StrudelMonkey)

The finest poor-road people’s car is the Citroen 2CV. A possibly apocryphal story is that the design brief was for a car that could carry a carton of eggs over an freshly ploughed field and not break any. I’m not sure if anyone’s ever tested to see if the goal was met, but the 2CV sure does have soft suspension, ideal for traversing Frech rural roads and inner-city cobblestones alike.

The 2CV has a twin-cylinder engine, like the Nano. Unlike the Nano, the 2CV’s lump is a horizontally-opposed design of radical symplicity — among other things it has no head gaskets.

The 2CV was produced for many years but was also made over into other models, none of which lasted as long as the 2CV or are as loved. The most notable are the Dyanne and Ami which are agressively modernist especially when to the 2CVs charming art-deco lines. Other variations included various delivery-type vans and the plastic-bodied Méhari.

Unlike the Nano, the 2CV is appealing and solves more than one problem.

The Renault 4

(4L pour L by Kat…)

The Renault 4 is, in many ways, a better 2CV. It’s more powerful (as in, it has adequate power, rather than nowhere near enough in the 2CV), arguably more practical and given the number still seeing daily duty in north Africa and the middle east, more robust.

Like the 2CV the R4 has long-travel soft suspension, all the better for dealing with country potholes and city curbs. And, like the 2CV, the R4 was designed with consideration of carrying loads. Like the 2CV the R4 also came in a variety of configurations, the oft-seen 4-door wagon and 2-door van being most common.

Back to the Nano

The Nano, on the other hand, appears to have no load carrying ability at all. Poor form.

Yes, it’s cleverly engineered. The fuel-injected engine is quite sophisticated. But I don’t think a tiny-wheeled high-and-narrow city car will be looked upon with the affection of the Beetle, the 2CV or the R4. Or even the Hindoostan Ambassador.

Perhaps that’s the problem. The Beetle, the 2CV and, to a lesser extent, the R4, are all design icons. They look good, but they also solve the problems that the designers decided to tackle. What’s more, by virtue of solving some very specific problems, the trio become more than their brief and are able to be thought of in new ways, to have those specific uses extended and transformed in use. The Nano, on the other hand, is sort of weird looking, and has space to seat four people. And that’s not enough.

Yesterday’s post was prompted by my recent reading of Robert Bruegmann’s very interesting Sprawl: A Compact History. He uses the LA is more dense than NYC figure a few times, mainly to say LA isn’t as “sprawling” (by some definitions) as is often made out and I wanted to see if it was possible to reproduce his results.

Then, thanks to the wonders of This Modern Age, someone who knows a great deal more than me about urban density discovered my post and responded. (I have a feeling that someone emailed it to him, probably with a “here’s another one” type of message.)

Robert McDonald is a “landscape ecologist who is broadly interested in the effects of land-use change and
urbanization on the maintenance of ecological and social function, at regional, global, and
international scales”.

He very graciously takes issue with my reproduction of the “myth” that LA is denser than NYC and shows some more interesting ways to consider density, particularly the “distribution of density”. He goes on to show that

The “average” house in LA is in a neighborhood of 10-15 homes/ha; 20% of houses fall in this category. The “average” housing unit in NY is in a neighborhood with more than 80 homes/ha; 27% of homes fall in this category. This kind of statistic becomes extremely important when considering the feasibility of mass transit, which (for light rail) works well above 40 homes/ha. Only 8% of houses are in such a neighborhood in LA, versus 32.6% of houses for NY.

And there you go. Is LA more dense than NYC? Yes, if you take raw numbers for the entire region, but it seems that the scale of either city is too large for that measure to be meaningful if you’re talking about things like mass transit.

This is the second blog all sticky-tabbed pages.

Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott is a great book. Scott is deeply interested in the interaction between people and places and what it is that makes people and places work well, play well, and live well together. He argues, convincingly, that an imposition of a simplifying top-down order stifles otherwise well-functioning assemblages of people, places and things. These top-down simplifying orders as imposed by the State in an effort to make a deeply heterogeneous system legible. However, Scott argues, this imposition of a simplified order for legibility’s sake often results in a diminution or destruction of the properties that make a heterogeneous system function.

If Seeing Like a State has a flaw its that, like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, the argument is set out in the first chapter; subsequent chapters do not really build new layers of complexity in the initial argument. The subsequent chapters are all well worth reading, being interesting accounts of the often arrogant and always foolish imposition of order on otherwise smoothly functioning systems or on the creation of seemingly perfect but overly simplified systems that could not function because of their beautiful simplicity.

Scott says that top-down-order is often (always?) imposed in order to make a complicated situation more manageable and “visible” to those who want to control it. Obviously, sometimes this imposition of order is necessary, but at other times it is heavy-handed and the imposition of order obscures previously rich situations.

Regarding the complexity of cities, Scott says:

A village, city or language is the jointly created, partly unintended product of many, many hands. To the degree that authorities insist on replacing this ineffably complex web of activity with formal rules and regulations, they are certain to disrupt the web in ways which they cannot possibly foresee. (p256)

And given the jointly created complexity of cities, creating new cities, for example Brasilia, or Canberra, by the imposition of rules and formal order is misguided at best.

It is possible, of course, to build a new city or a new village, but it will be a “thin” or “shallow” city, and its residents will have to begin (perhaps from known repertoires) to make it work in spite of the rules. (p256, again)

Scott spends a lot of time dissecting many different, and disastrous, impositions of order, or what he calls, with no small amount of disdain, “high modernism”. The individual cases are interesting and absorbing and each is dealt with in great detail, encompassing the political situation, the geographical context and the resultant disaster.

In the penultimate chapter, Scott seems to take a ninety-degree turn and begins to discuss the concept of mētis which, briefly, relates to the idea that some activities are only able to be understood through participation.

One powerful indication that they all require mētis is that they are exceptionally difficult to teach apart from engaging in the activity itself. (p313)

Scott’s argument is that all of the richness of living in a city, or the management of a forest, cannot be distilled into algorithmic, simplified, rules but must be experienced.

The necessarily implicit, experiential nature of mētis seems central. (p315)

This is an argument that is familiar to me, through amazing books like Gary Klein’s awesome but little-known Sources of Power and Malcolm Gladwell’s good (but not outstanding) Blink. Scott even gets in the apparently obligatory Red Adair story about expertise acquired in the field on p314 (Klein and Gladwell also mention Adair).

For our purposes, however it [i.e. the concept of mētis] illustrates a rudimentary kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by practice and that all but defies being communicated in written or oral form apart from actual practice. (p315)

Scott says is fond of experientially-learned rules. “Rules of thumb”, in other words.

Knowing how and when to apply the rules of thumb in a concrete situation is the essence of mētis. (p316)

Anticipating accusations of favouring a return to folk ways as a rejection of top-down order, Scott explains that mētis is essential in the modern world.

Such terms as “indigenous technical knowledge” and “folk wisdom” seem to me to confine this knowledge to “traditional” and “backward” peoples, whereas I want to emphasise how these skills are implicit in the most modern of activities, whether on the factory floor or in a research laboratory. “Local knowledge” and “practical knowledge” are better, but both terms seem too circumscribed and static to capture the constantly changing, dynamic aspect of mētis. (p424, note 8 )

Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you might be thinking that Scott possibly has “libertarian” tendencies. Being against the imposition of “some schemes to improve the human condition” would certainly lead you to believe he was generally in favour of unfettered laissez-faire arrangements. Not so:

Proponents of this view (the logic of the market) forget or ignore, I think, the fact the in order to do its work, the market requires its own vast simplifications in treating land (nature) and labour (people) as factors of production (commodities). This, in turn, can and has been profoundly destructive of human communities and of nature. In a sense, the simplification of the scientific forest compounds the simplification of scientific measurement and the simplification made possible by the commercial market for wood. (p412, note 112)

In the early parts of Seeing Like a State Scott acknowledges that he seems to have more than one point to make and is taking more than one road to get there. Perhaps that is true. However, I found it interesting to see the threads on the same general argument that Klein, Gladwell, and even Winograd and Flores, Lucy Suchman and others have made, all on different topics and all with their grounding in different fields of study.

The argument is that human experience of, and human experiences with technologies, be they tangible like photocopiers, evanescent like cities or ephemeral like ideas about management are so rich and so nuanced by virtue of being human experiences that their complexity cannot be fully captured in rules. And, because of this impossibility of complete description in formal rules, any attempt to create formal rules about rich human experiences almost inevitably leads to impoverished and undesirable technologies.

It is possible, of course, to build a new city or a new village, but it will be a “thin” or “shallow” city, and its residents will have to begin (perhaps from known repertoires) to make it work in spite of the rules. (James C Scott, p256 of Seeing Like a State)

Scott has little to say about Canberra in his book about the failures of planned cities, though having lived in Canberra, Australias most planned city, much of what he says applies.

Like all planned cities, the main part of Canberra is intended to be hugely impressive. Grand avenues sweep past enormous expanses of lawn which surround the ceremonial buildings of the State: Parliament House, the High Court, the National Gallery and the National Library. Of course, people can’t live in ceremonial buildings and the original suburbs are pretty in their way, though sharply divided in their tone.

Here is an affluent suburb with rolling lawns, hedge fences and curving streets. Here is a working class suburb, flat with cookie-cutter cottages and long straight streets.

The suburbs that have sprung up after the abandonment of the original plan are placed away from the ceremonial core and can only be reached by wide highways connecting the satellite cities. The satellites (from North to South: Gungalin, Belconnen, Woden and Tugerranong) are mostly dormitory suburbs, enlivened by a central shopping mall and a few streets of commercial and (very) light industrial buildings. Some of the larger federal departments have their offices in the satellites, perhaps as a way to alleviate the meagre traffic problems in Canberra, or perhaps as a way to increase the appeal of living in a satellite suburb.

Each suburb, new or old, is allocated one or perhaps two “corner shops” to complement the nearest large mall. Some corner shops are mini high-streets with a small second tier supermarket and the associated businesses that spring up around them. Others are oddly neglected and often have extremely unexpected collections of businesses. The closest shops to where I lived in Canberra featured a dingy bar, a Vietnamese restaurant that was not very well attended, a photocopier repair shop and a commercial plumbing supplier. Needless to say, the car park at my local shops was never very full.

And, carparks are important because Canberra must be encountered by car, unless you are willing to confine yourself to one satellite or the centre of Canberra, in which case a bike is advised. Canberra is not a walking city.

Coming into Canberra by car, the roads are all wide and cut through what is variously lush countryside or, increasingly, very dry countryside. For the most part, evidence of habitation is not apparent as the roads travel along valleys between the suburbs. Unlike cities that have grown more organically, businesses that would otherwise try to be cited by main roads are hidden within suburbs, even petrol stations and malls are hidden in the satellites and are not even visible, for the most part, from the main highways.

Compounding the difficulties in getting around Canberra is the fact that most of the road signage assumes some familiarity with the layout of the city in general. Heading from Belconnen to Woden down the main connecting highway, the signage closest to Belconnen typically indicates only Tuggeranong and not the intermediate southern satellite.

Visitors to Canberra complain about being unable to find anything. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, this is part of the design. Even more surprisingly, the idea that a designed city is less intuitive than one that has grown organically is sort of strange. You could make the argument that as most people’s experiences of cities are of undesigned ones, their intuition is “tuned” by a particular sort of city. Though, perhaps that is only part of the story. Perhaps the rules that go into designed city are not nuanced enough for people to live in. As Scott points out, the residents of a designed city have to make it work “in spite of the rules”.

Having lived in Canberra, I think that the “rules” that are needed to live there are different to other cities, designed or otherwise. The rules are different because normal city rules don’t work and the rules built into Canberra don’t completely work. They’re a third type of rule. A rule that comes about to get around the rules that don’t work. To live in Canberra, you need to see it, not through the eyes of someone used to a “natural” city; you need to see it like a Canberran.

1. Bird By Bird — Anne Lamott
2. The Logic of Liberty — Michael Polanyi
3. Seeing Like a State — James C. Scott
4. How to be a Genius — Paul Barker
5. Lies, Deep Fries and Statistics — segments from ABC Radio National’s Occams Razor program, introduced by Robyn Williams
6. If Only They Could Talk — James Herriott
7. It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet — James Herriott
8. Let Sleeping Vets Lie — James Herriott
9. Vet in Harness — James Herriott
10. Vets Might Fly — James Herriott
11. Vet in a Spin — James Herriott

At OZCHI 2007, Paul Dourish presented a wide-ranging paper called “Seeing Like an Interface” that explored ideas of “legibility” and organisation of spaces and settings with a focus on mobile and ubiquitous computing.Dourish notes that ubicomp has often begun with the idea of extending desktop-type applications and everyday scenarios to mobile settings.

However, we do not just experience technologies in situ – we also experience everyday settings through the technologies we have at our disposal.

That is, Dourish is thinking about how people experience and understand the settings in which they find themselves. And he is interested in the representations that people use, or construct for themselves, to engage with and understand particular settings.To explore this big idea, Dourish starts with James Scott’s Seeing Like a State which is an exploration of how “some schemes to improve the human condition have failed”. Scott’s book describes how states introduce abstractions in order to understand and control particular situations. Sometimes these abstractions take the form of maps. Dourish quotes Scott,

In case after case, however, we have remarked on the apparent power of maps to transform as well as merely to summarize the facts that they portray.

Dourish again:

Scott is concerned, then, not just with the forms of abstraction and representation that are introduced, but with the ways in which these come to constitute the legibility of everyday life to the practice of statehood; they are the forms of “seeing” in which states can engage.

Whenever we engage with a setting through mediated interaction, we are seeing it through a representation or abstraction. As such, computers are becoming part of the way that we engage with the world, they have become cultural objects, a fact that Dourish believes requires further investigation.

What I want to draw attention to here is not simply the fact that computers have become faster, smaller, and more powerful as technological artifacts, but that they have emerged as cultural objects in a radically different way than they did before.

Because ubicomp systems are (going to be) so much a part of the world, Dourish suggests that they may be a good place to begin exploring the idea of “reflective” systems, ones that are “concerned with the critical dimensions of design, and is also oriented towards promoting reflection and critical inquiry into technological devices on the part of ‘users.’ “

As a design strategy, we have been interested in the ways in which we might be able to use information technologies to turn attention towards modes of seeing – strategic modes, tactical modes, surveillant modes, practical modes, and more. Our concern is to highlight the forms of representation and standardization at work, to turn attention to the processes through which they emerge and the sites at which they are negotiated, and so to make visible the various grids in which people are enmeshed and which they enact in the course of daily life.

This is the paper I presented at OZCHI in Adelaide (get the paper from QUT’s ePrints service).

In this paper, we describe the methods we have used to investigate expertise in interaction with physical interfaces. This paper covers the background of the interfaces (compression bandages), describes the methods used and presents findings on the use of tacit and explicit knowledge during interaction. Due to the increase in interest in interfaces that cross between the physical and digital, this method may be of interest to researchers who are involved in similar projects

Complex physical interfaces, for example compression bandages (which Professor Vesna Popovic and I studied), or other sophisticated tools, are interesting because few of the existing usability rules apply. Complex physical interfaces require long-term engagement to master. They are not designed, or intended, to be easily understood by novices, or even by people who are relatively competent. They are, in short, really hard to use well without a great deal of practice.

Complex interfaces are also really hard to understand from the users point of view because they are, almost by necessity, experts. Normal ways that you might go about accessing what a user thinks about when they’re using the artefact or interface don’t work (as well as they might) because they have been developed for use with novices. For example, talk-aloud protocol only sort of works for experts because much of what they do is tacit — they’ve become so expert that they can no longer verbalise their thought processes.

What we did in this research was see if we could identify how users were thinking about a complex interface/artefact.

We were able to show, qualitatively, that just through observation you can identify times when people are using more tacit knowledge, that is they are acting like experts, and times when people are using more explicit knowledge, that is they are acting like competent non-experts.

This is a big deal because we’ve shown that existing theories of expertise (continue to) scale across tasks, activities and disciplines. Also, we think we’re able to scale our approach to other physical interfaces. And that means that we’ll be better able to understand the actual use of physical interfaces, or indeed interfaces that are a mix of physical and digital, in the real world not just in a lab. And if we can get closer to understanding what people think and do, we can design better artefacts.

Ozchi2007 was great.

It was a bit smaller than some years, though the quality was high. Some very interesting paper, including Paul Dourish’s Seeing Like a State, some interesting work from Jeni Paay and Jesper Kjeldskov, Floyd Mueller’s physical games and heaps of cool stuff from CSIRO and NICTA.

In the next few days I’ll present my take on a few of the papers that I thought were great.