archive.Joe Lamantia.com

This weekend I went looking online for the service manual for my oven, to effect some DIY style repair work, and was unpleasantly surprised to find every collection of digital service manuals within ready googling distance locked tightly away behind a solid e-commerce wall.

Ten, five, or even three years ago, some thoughtful mechanical engineer would have lovingly uploaded a blurry pdf conversion of a scan of a photocopy of the original KorEnglish instruction manual to a public file share hosted somewhere deep in the wilds of homebrew electronics land.  And there it would be, waiting for people who needed it.

Not anymore, apparently.  Thanks to all the MBAs who read The Long Tail during the revenue models section of their Digital Business courses, and then went prospecting for an under-monetized content domain with predictable transaction and renewal flow volumes (read, opportunity), I now have to pay $20 to find out how to take apart my ailing appliance.  To soften the monetary blow, I have an instantly findable, one-click-to-purchase, secure-payment-capable experience.  But it’s still $20, when it would have been free last time I looked.

Take note, this is a sea change in digital culture staring us in the face: DIY become $DIY, thanks to ‘rationalization’ of the home brew electronics information economy.

If it sounds like I’m bemoaning the simple fact that businesses like to colonize new markets, and I now have to pay for something I used to get for free, I want to say ‘Not true.’  (Okay, partially true.)  Something was wrong with this experience.  At first I thought it was price: That manual is fully digital, meaning it comes with absurdly low publication costs for printing, distribution, inventory and restocking, thanks to the-great-copying-machine-in-the-sky-called-the-Internet.  It’s also transparently findable via a simple two-word query, which I know because I went looking for it myself, so there’s few of the typical costs from AIDA (generating awareness and motivating my decision to buy).  Yet the instruction and service manual for a piece of hand-me-down kitchen equipment now carries the hefty price tag of $19.95.  And that’s without a preview; this is digital merchandise I’m expected to buy on blind faith.  So much for free.

Then I realized something deeper was involved.  This experience is interesting because it demonstrates the inevitable tension that comes from living in an era during which basic cultural layers, with very different ways of assigning value, come into friction with one another.  At heart, this is a modern experience of value dissonance driven by two ancient human patterns in collision.

The first pattern: I am ‘given’ the oven for ‘free’ by virtue of my ‘membership’ – earned by marriage – in the local operating unit of the folk-recycling economy instantiated by my extended family; specifically, my Dutch in-laws.  Apartments in Europe don’t come with appliances, so after moving to Holland from New York, I need a new oven thanks to the legacy incompatibility in electric distribution infrastructures (voltage differences) between Norte America and Europa.  This lovely unit was available from the family’s pool of collectively managed assets, thanks to a construction accident in my wife’s cousin’s neighbor’s adjoining property, which caused a flood of water into their home while they were on a 3-week  holiday, resulting in substantial water damage, compensated in proper Dutch fashion by a hefty insurance settlement, which allowed this particular pair of agents in the extended family network to go shopping for a new kitchen set-up, all appliances included, long before the projected lifecycle expiration of their current oven. [ill winds indeed…])

This pattern is as old as managing the aggregate livestock and pasturage.  Deciding which of the children to educate, send to the military / priesthood (or some other form of bachelorhood), or sequester in a convent b/c of lack of required marriage dowries is the same thing.  For me, all is fine and good: I have the oven I need, and all I have to do in return is allow the extended family to use my house to host the annual family New Year’s dinner.   A fair trade for all parties.

The second pattern: the constant evolution in the definition of first-tier tradable goods: Successive waves of technosocial change have made the instruction manual for my oven a digitally tradeable good on it’s own.  At brith, the manual was “part of” the consumer product package of the oven, only available – and meaningful – when sold with the appliance.  Fast forward to the pre-Long Tail Internet, and the manual was free to me, as a resident of the unfenced realm of the digital frontier, exchanged via the folk economy of DIY practitioners.  But now that the technical infrastructure required to effectively enclose this resource is  itself nearly free, and every MBA knows the Long Tail (sounds like one of those terrible fake American Indian names people used be given in TV sitcoms, when some form of hijinks led them to visit a ‘Native American Tribe,’ and the characters had to be identified within the tribe’s conceptual space [another example of truly awful sort of cultural friction…]), this particular piece of digital content has a price tag.  A hefty one.

So using the free appliance now requires content from the ambient information cloud in the form of a paid asset that is now, on it’s own, a tradable good.  This misalignment causes friction and dissonance for me; I have an appliance from the folk-resources layer, but all the useful information *about* the appliance resides in the newly monetized Long Tail digital content economy.  The newly digital manual that should come with my hand me down oven is very much trying its hardest to be a traditional product from the universe of tradable goods: a Thing, with a Price, sold by a Business, to Customers.

What drives the friction, and what makes this worth paying attention to and writing about, is that it is the opposing direction of the movements of these different kinds of goods, digital and material, that creates dissonance by bringing me a free physical oven and an expensive digital service manual.

The oven used to be part of the first-tier tradable goods layer.  It was a packaged consumer appliance product, created by a manufacturer, sold via optimized distribution networks that moved it through the chain from manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer at a fixed price, communicated via marketing channels embedded within discovery and communications media.  Since then, it’s ‘fallen out of’ the tradable goods economy, and is treated as a family asset, to be handed around as best suits the collective needs, without any official transactions taking place.  We could put it back into the tradable goods economy as used, if we choose to sell it, or even enter it into the recycling economy, where it would be broken down into constituent elements – e.g. motors, wiring, display, or at a lower level of integration physical materials like glass and steel – to whatever extent possible.  But almost all of the changes in value for material goods when they shift from one cultural / economic layer to another are one-way, and downwards.  The possible paths for re-uptake of material goods that have fallen into the folk economy layer used to be transformation into antiques, art, or collectibles – all one form or another of the museum economy.

That’s not the case with digital goods in general, like the newly Long Tailed service manual for my oven.  The manual was originally part of the consumer / product economy for tradable goods when bundled with the oven.   Since then, it has undergone several transformations.  First, it was un-bundled and digitized for the DIY layer (making it part of the folk economy),  Now it is once again part of the product economy, though now in it’s un-bundled  and digitized form.  In terms of which economy it’s part of, *the manual is moving all around the page on it’s own*.  That’s highly unnatural!

This is a key property of digital goods that the material world is just beginning to understand.  Digital goods are designed for just this sort of mobility: We can move digital goods all around the map in terms of the cultural / economic layers they inhabit, and their consequent value, with a few changes in addressing and format.  No transformation of a digital good is necessarily one-way.  And when these transformations aren’t synchronized with the elements that inhabit the physical world, we feel the conflict and tension that results.

In my case, the oven is moving one way, while the information about it is moving the other way.  This failure to dance together economically and culturally is a consequence of the way that the oven was designed, made, marketed, distributed, etc.  It’s a temporally isolated form of dissonance that emerges from friction with the new digital layer that’s permeating the world so rapidly.  If you’re familiar with spimes, and related concepts like service avatars and information shadows, you know this is a (ostensibly) temporary state of affairs.  Once our cultural frames of reference catch up with our technical capabilities, and everything is part of the great database in the sky, these experiences of friction should be much less common.

But in the meantime, I have to fix my oven on my own.  Or cough up the $20 for the manual…

I’ve been focused on understanding future directions in the landscape of digital experiences recently (which nicely parallels some of the work I’ve been doing on design and futures in general), so I’m sharing a summary of the analysis that’s come out of this research.
This presentation shares an overview of all the major waves of change affecting digital experiences, some of the especially forward-looking insights around shifts in our identities, and the implications for those creating digital experiences.
The 8 waves discussed here (are there more? let me know!)

• Digital = Social
• Co-Creation
• Digital Natives
• Itʼs All a Game
• Take Away
• Everyware
• Convergence
• Seeing Is Believing

There’s a lot of buzz about cloud computing in the technology world these days, but I think something much more interesting is the emergence of cultural clouds as the newest kind of public commons. By cultural clouds, I’m talking about the new layer of the human cultural stack we’re busy laying down as a by product of all our social and creative activities in the inofverse.
To be clear, I’m not referring to the IT infrastructure layer wherein cloud computing is defined as the “style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ across the Internet to multiple external customers.” [Thanks Gartner, via BusinessWeek]

These new cultural clouds appear in the ever growing collections of crowdsourced collectively or socially accumulated judgements, cultural products, knowledge, history, relationships, etc., encoded in the form of managed digital information. This quick illustration shows some of the pools of activity and judgement that that make up these cloud commons; including wikis, public media, reputation statements, reading recommendations, social networks, wish lists, music listening histories, shared photos, films and videos, citation networks, geotagging and memory maps, comments and public discourse, hashtags and tags for photos, URLs, and songs, link streams, subscription and feed lists, blogrolls, etc. These are social, cultural, and conversational resources, not mineral deposits or physical topographies.

New Cultural Clouds / Commons

The commons is an old construct that embraces natural resources – think land, air, water, the electromagnetic spectrum – and the more recent public domain of cultural materials not governed by copyright law.
Venerable institutions of custom and law, such as seasonal access to pasturage, the right of passage across borders for nomadic peoples, and common law, define and regulate the recognized forms of commons.

But socially collected, digital, reified human cultural products and judgements are a new *type* of commons. I think they’re a new type of resource, brought forth largely by the cognitive surplus we enjoy. And as profound technological permeation and ubiquitous computing bring on the age of everyware, the cloud commons will grow (and fragment / specialize / multiply?).
Who and what will govern the new cloud commons? How will we define and manage these resources?

By form and makeup, the cloud commons is ephemeral and distributed. But as digital information, it is eminently tangible and actionable. Our basic social structures and mechanisms – science, the law, economics, art, agriculture, religion, technology – will recognize the emergence of cloud commons, and respond accordingly. APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language), from the APML Working Group, is an example. The DataPortability project – “a group created to promote the idea that individuals have control over their data by determining how they can use it and who can use it. This includes access to data that is under the control of another entity.” – is another. [Advocating for the right to free movement of data is a digital analog of the ancient idea of right of way.] OpenID, OpenSocial, OAuth, OPML, and the rapidly evolving Creative Commons licensing system are other examples of responses to the appearance of cloud commons.

What does the future hold? As recognition of cloud-based commons grows, expect to see all the patterns of activity typical of new frontiers and zones of instability: wildcatting, pioneering, piracy, squatting, privateering, enclosure, slums and shanty towns (informal settlements in the parlance of architecuter and urban planning) extractive industries, sovereign claims, colonization, speculation, etc.

With history as a guide, I’m especially wary of enclosure movements, and extractive industries. Both practices can rapidly diminish the present value of a commons or commons-based resource. Worse, enclosure and extractive practices act as negative feedback mechanisms, decreasing current estimations of a commons or commons-based resource’s future value, making the tragedy of the commons a likely outcome scenario.

The U.S. radio spectrum, as enclosed by the FCC

Is this framing of recently formed clouds of information and activity data as a new kind of commons accurate? Useful?

More on the idea of cultural clouds as the new commons forthcoming.

The I.A. Podcast (by Jeff Parks of I.A. Consultants and BoxesandArrows podcast fame) just published the first of two interviews we recorded recently, talking about ethics, design, social media, and conflict.

Play and download the interview here.

Subscribe to the iTunes and feedburner feeds for the I.A. Podcast here.

Stay tuned for the second interview!

Thanks Jeff!

Now that the web is clearly social, what hap­pens when the web becomes emo­tional?

Streams are already under pres­sure from the tech­no­rati as expired. What will fol­low the stream (which is a liq­uid, really) as a metaphor for the state of the infor­ma­tion layer? Gases, or plas­mas? What will gases and plas­mas made of infor­ma­tion feel like expe­ri­en­tially? How will they behave?

Does it even make sense to think about this in terms of the states of mat­ter, or will infor­ma­tion exhibit dif­fer­ent states and take dif­fer­ent forms?

The culture, structure, and workings of an organization often pose greater challenges for User Experience practitioners than any technical or design questions at hand. If you’d like to know more about the factors behind these situations, be sure to check out We Tried To Warn You: The Organizational Architecture of Failure, by Peter Jones, just published by Boxes and Arrows.

Peter is an independent consultant with deep expertise in research, product design, and strategy. His talk for the panel on failure at the 2007 IA Summit was insightful and in-depth, and this two-part series offers quite a bit more very useful material on the roots and warning signs of organizational failure (by comparison, consider the very brief post I put up on the same subject a few years ago.)

Peter’s is the second written feature to come out of the failure panel (my missive on the parallels between entrepreneurial and societal failure was the first). I’m looking forward to part two of We Tried To Warn You, as well as additional features from the remaining two panelists, Christian Crumlish and Lorelei Brown!

Here’s a snippet, to whet your appetite:

How do we even know when an organization fails? What are the differences between a major product failure (involving function or adoption) and a business failure that threatens the organization? An organizational-level failure is a recognizable event, one which typically follows a series of antecedent events or decisions that led to the large-scale breakdown. My working definition: When significant initiatives critical to business strategy fail to meet their highest-priority stated goals.”

Common models for participation in social and contributory media invariably set ‘content creators’ – the group of people who provide original material – at the top of an implied or explicit scale of comparative value. Bradley Horowitz’s Content Production Pyramid is one example, Forrester’s Social Technographics Ladder is another. In these models, value – usually to potential marketers or advertisers external to the domain in question – is usually measured in terms of the level of involvement of the different groups present, whether consumers, synthesizers, or creators.

By the numbers, these models are accurate: the vast majority of the content in social media comes from a small slice of the population. And for businesses, content creators offer greater potential to commercialize / monetize / trade influence.

It’s time to evolve these models a bit, to better align them with the sweeping DIY cultural and technological shift happening offline in the real world, as well as online.

The DIY shift manifests in many ways:

• Web 2.0 culture of contribution, self-publishing
• Commoditized / outsourced / on-demand design, development & manufacturing
• Shadow IT
• Open Source & public data sets
• APIs, Web Services, SOA (public and private)
• Mashup infrastructure: Yahoo Pipes, Google Gadgets
• Physical goods: fabbers, and fab-labs ReadyMade, Make

The essential feature of the DIY shift is co-creation: the presence of many more people in *all aspects* of creation and production, whether of software, goods, ideas, etc. Co-creation encompasses more than straightforward on-line content creation – such as sharing a photo, or writing a blog post – acknowledged by the architecture of participation, user-generated content (and ugly term…), crowd-sourcing, and collective and contributory media models.

Co-creation includes active shaping of structure, pattern, rules, and mechanisms, that support simple content creation. This requires activity and involvement from roles we often label editor, builder, designer, or architect, depending on the context. The pyramid and ladder models either implicitly collapse these perspectives into the general category of ‘creator’, which obscures very important distinctions between them, or leaves them out entirely (I’m not sure which). It is possible to plot these more nuanced creative roles on the general continuum of ‘level of involvement’, and I often do this when I talk about the future of design in the DIY world.

A better model for this world is the ecology of co-creation, which recognizes that the key difference between industrial production models and the DIY future is that the walls separating traditional creators from consumers have fallen, and all parties interconnect. Judgements of value in ecologies take on very different meanings: Consider the differing but all vitally important roles of producers, consumers, and decomposers in a living ecosystem.

What will an ecology of co-creation look like in practical / operational form? In The Bottom Is Not Enough, Kevin Kelly offers, “…now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.”

An ecology of co-creation that combines top-down architecture and design with bottom-up contribution and participation will take the form of a deliberate hybrid.

I’ll quote Kelly again (at some length):

Here’s how I sum it up:  The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further than even seems possible. It keeps surprising us in this regard. Given enough time, dumb things can be smarter than we think.

At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.

The systems we keep will be hybrid creations. They will have a strong rootstock of peer-to-peer generation, grafted below highly refined strains of controlling functions.  Sturdy, robust foundations of user-made content and crowd-sourced innovation will feed very small slivers of leadership agility. Pure plays of 100% smart mobs or 100% smart elites will be rare.

The real art of business and organizations in the network economy will not be in harnessing the crowd of “everybody” (simple!) but in finding the appropriate hybrid mix of bottom and top for each niche, at the right time. The mix of control/no-control will shift as a system grows and matures.

[Side note: Metaphors for achieving the appropriate mix of control/no-control for a system will likely include choreographing, cultivating, tuning, conducting, and shepherding, in contrast to our current directive framings such as driving, directing, or managing.]

Knowledge at Wharton echoes Kelly, in their recent article The Experts vs. the Amateurs: A Tug of War over the Future of Media
A tug of war over the future of media may be brewing between so-called user-generated content — including amateurs who produce blogs, video and audio for public consumption — and professional journalists, movie makers and record labels, along with the deep-pocketed companies that back them. The likely outcome: a hybrid approach built around entirely new business models, say experts at Wharton.

No one has quite figured out what these new business models will look like, though experimentation is under way with many new ventures from startups and existing organizations.

The BBC is putting hybridization and tuning into effect now, albeit in limited ways that do not reflect a dramatic shift of business model.

In Value of citizen journalism Peter Horrocks writes:

Where the BBC is hosting debate we will want the information generated to be editorially valuable. Simply having sufficient resource to be able to moderate the volume of debate we now receive is an issue in itself.

And the fact that we are having to apply significant resource to a facility that is contributed regularly by only a small percentage of our audiences is something we have to bear in mind. Although of course a higher proportion read forums or benefit indirectly from how it feeds into our journalism. So we may have to loosen our grip and be less worried about the range of views expressed, with very clear labeling about the BBC’s editorial non-endorsement of such content. But there are obvious risks.

We need to be able to extract real editorial value from such contributions more easily. We are exploring as many technological solutions as we can for filtering the content, looking for intelligent software that can help journalists find the nuggets and ways in which the audience itself can help us to cope with the volume and sift it.

What does all this mean for design(ers)? Stay tuned for part two…

Thanks to Facebook’s public mistakes and apology to those affected by Beacon , as well as a number of other ham-handed attempts to monetize the social graph, the intersection of ethics, design, and social networks is receiving overdue attention. Two talks at this year’s Information Architecture Summit in Miami will look at ethics as it applies to the daily work of creating social networks, and user experiences in general.

First is Designing for the social: Avoiding anti-social networks, by Miles Rochford, description below.

This presentation considers the role of traditional social networks and the role of IAs in addressing the challenges that arise when designing and using online social networks.

The presentation discusses philosophical approaches to sharing the self, how this relates to offline social networks and human interactions in different contexts, and provides guidance on how online social networking tools can be designed to support these relationships.

It also covers ethical issues, including privacy, and how these can conflict with business needs. A range of examples illustrate the impact of these drivers and how design decisions can lead to the creation of anti-social networks.

Related: the social networks anti-patterns list from the microformats.org wiki.

The second is The impact of social ethics on IA and interactive design – experiences from the Norwegian woods, by Karl Yohan Saeth and Ingrid Tofte, described as follows:

This presentation discusses ethics in IA from a practical point of view. Through different case studies we illustrate the impact of social ethics on IA and interactive design, and sum up our experiences on dealing with ethics in real projects.

If you’re interested in ethics and the practicalities of user experience (and who isn’t?), both sessions look good. I’ll be talking about other things at the summit this year. In the meantime, stay tuned for the second article in my UXMatters series on designing ethical experiences, due for publication very soon.

My slides from Blogtalk 2008 are available online now: I went through a lot of ideas quickly, so this is a good way to follow along at your own pace…

FYI: This version of the deck includes presenters notes – I’ll upload a (larger!) view-only version once I’m back from holiday in lovely Eire.

UXMatters just published part 1 of a two part series I’m writing on ethics and design titled, Designing Ethical Experiences: Social Media and the Conflicted Future.

Here’s an excerpt, to whet your appetites for a practical take on what’s often seen as a philosophical subject.

Questions of ethics and conflict can seem far removed from the daily work of user experience (UX) designers who are trying to develop insight into people’s needs, understand their outlooks, and design with empathy for their concerns. In fact, the converse is true: When conflicts between businesses and customers–or any groups of stakeholders–remain unresolved, UX practitioners frequently find themselves facing ethical dilemmas, searching for design compromises that satisfy competing camps. This dynamic is the essential pattern by which conflicts in goals and perspectives become ethical concerns for UX designers. Unchecked, it can lead to the creation of unethical experiences that are hostile to users–the very people most designers work hard to benefit–and damaging to the reputations and brand identities of the businesses responsible.

Stay tuned for part two, which will share a set of suggestions for how design can manage conflict and work toward the creation of ethical integrated experiences. Meanwhile, let us know what you think of the ideas here, or at the UXMatters site.