archive.Joe Lamantia.com

JoeLamantia.com complemented my formal professional work in technology, design, product, and strategy, beginning with the early(ish) Web moment of the middle 90s.

For approximately 15 years, beginning about 2000, the site shared practice-related tools, methods, frameworks, industry and academic publications, professional presentations, and evolving perspectives (after 2006, genuinely raw thinking out loud mostly happened via Twitter).

The final postings publish industry analysis on the then-emerging field of data science, with a broader frame of the expansionary category of analytically-driven business products and services.  My roles at the time emphasized product strategy for B2B software applications and B2C platforms powered by predictive models built from collections of business, consumer, and research data – composite assets newly recognized as Big Data.  I described this as  the machine intelligence space, to clarify the focus on new technology and product development outcomes, and distinguish the broader category of AI.

From 2016 onwards, with ‘software eating the world‘, my professional roles shifted to leading scaled / scaling product development groups, with charters emphasizing innovation powered by the expanding stable of human-centered technology disciplines: information architecture, interaction design, user experience, content strategy, design research, product strategy (still not well-articulated…).  With broad success and growth within the business context (read, steady buyers), the questions shifted from foundational — e.g. codifying ‘What is User Experience?’, and shaping ‘How does it even happen?’ — to operational  — ‘How is this done better at scale?  In new channels?  For the entire business? With customers around the world?’

To answer these basic ‘get it done’ questions on crafting human-informed products daily within large business contexts, the cross-border communities for product development, technology, and media spun up a healthy circuit of professional gatherings,  and a layer of complimentary social forums.  Conversations that originally took place via small group gatherings and niche news groups or listservs, shifted to Big Conferences, and Big Social Platforms.

In that landscape, there was less to share directly in the blog format.  Also, there was the rest of life: family, home, community.

Then in 2018, after a series of minor maintenance and administration incidents, that show how the social Web and the entire Internet environment was changing to a regime of financialized surveillance capitalism, and algorithmically amplified predation, there was no ‘there’, there.  JoeLamantia.com went dark, as far as sharing my work was concerned.  The domain was doing a different job, for different audiences. and stayed that way.

Before I decided to focus fully on looking ahead and making new things for the new spaces of the early Web, I’d planned to study history, media, and technology – essentially looking in the other direction, as a scholar.  I *almost* did a PhD at U. Chicago or Pitt (thanks to both programs for seeing potential and offering opportunity).  This path not taken taught me the deep value of a historical perspective, especially when you’re considering where to go next, and how to get there.

Now, almost exactly ten years since the last original post in June of 2014, following a modest technical reanimation effort, I’m happy to offer a restored archive version of JoeLamantia.com.  It’s not *everything* that was written, said, or shared — but it’s most of what mattered.  We’re back.

To move forward, we’ll be reflecting on some of the “practice-related tools, methods, frameworks, industry and academic publications, professional presentations, and evolving perspectives” shared, to assess and learn from them by looking in both directions.

Thanks for your consideration: then, and now.

2009 was a big year for aug­mented real­ity, and there are many pre­dic­tions that 2010 will be even big­ger; with accom­plish­ments com­ing in the form of new tech­nolo­gies, devices, busi­ness mod­els, and ways of hav­ing fun.  But even as we go about build­ing this emerg­ing medium, we’re still rely­ing largely on old-media style cen­tral­ized under­stand­ings of the pro­duc­tion mod­els, form, and con­tent of the aug­mented world.  What hap­pens when we grasp the new social and inter­ac­tion pos­si­bil­i­ties of aug­mented reality?

I’m part of a panel titled The Next Wave of AR: Explor­ing Social Aug­mented Expe­ri­ences that’s address­ing this ques­tion at the Where 2.0 con­fer­ence in San Jose in late March / early April.  We’ve got a good group of speak­ers that includes Tish Shute (Ugo­trade), whur­ley * (whur­leyvi­sion llc),Jeremy Hight (Mis­sion Col­lege, CA), and Thomas Wro­bel (Lost Again).  Our goal is to look ahead at how aug­mented real­ity will soon evolve to include — or be based on! — mean­ing­ful social inter­ac­tions and dynam­ics at small and large group scales.

In the spirit of co-created social aug­mented expe­ri­ences, we’re ask­ing for audi­ence con­tri­bu­tions: in the form of sim­ple sce­nar­ios that describe the future of social AR.  What will it feel like? Who will you inter­act with?  How will these expe­ri­ences change every­day life?

Panel Sum­mary (full descrip­tion on the Where 2.0 site)

This panel will dis­cuss shared aug­mented real­i­ties, con­sid­er­ing some of the essen­tial pos­si­bil­i­ties and chal­lenges inher­ent in this new class of social aug­mented expe­ri­ences. The for­mat is pre­sen­ta­tion of a small set of sce­nar­ios (defined in advance, with audi­ence input) describ­ing likely future forms of shared aug­mented real­i­ties at dif­fer­ing scales of social engage­ment for dis­cus­sion by a panel of lead­ing prac­ti­tion­ers in tech­nol­ogy, expe­ri­ence design, net­worked urban­ism, inter­face design, game design, and aug­mented reality.

Cur­rent aug­mented real­ity expe­ri­ences put who you are, where you are, what you are doing, and what is around you at cen­ter stage. But we can already look beyond the first stage of inter­ac­tions assum­ing a sin­gle user see­ing sim­ple arrows and tags indi­cat­ing POIs, and begin to explore shared (multiuser/multisource) aug­mented real­i­ties.
These social aug­mented expe­ri­ences will allow not only mashups, & mul­ti­source data flows, but dynamic over­lays (not lim­ited to 3d), cre­ated by dis­trib­uted groups of users, linked to location/place/time, and syn­di­cated to peo­ple who wish to engage with the expe­ri­ence by view­ing and co-creating ele­ments for their own goals and benefit.

Share your sce­nar­ios for the Next Wave of AR in the com­ments or else­where (tag nextwaveAR socialAR), and come to Where 2.0 and see the panel!

UX Mat­ters just pub­lished Anony­mous Cow­ards, Avatars, and the Zeit­geist: Per­sonal Iden­tity in Flux.  This is the lat­est install­ment of my col­umn on ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing and user expe­ri­ence, and it takes on the ques­tion of how per­sonal iden­tity is chang­ing is a result of the rise of dig­i­tal tools, ser­vices, and mea­sure­ments for iden­tity.   Iden­tity is a fun­da­men­tal aspect of expe­ri­ence, so it’s crit­i­cal that we under­stand what is hap­pen­ing to this uni­ver­sal ele­ment.  ‘Anony­mous Cow­ards’ is the first of two parts, focused on under­stand­ing how dig­i­tal iden­ti­ties work, and are dif­fer­ent from what we know.  Here’s an excerpt:

Dri­ven by dra­matic shifts in tech­nol­ogy, eco­nom­ics, and media, noth­ing less than a trans­for­ma­tion in the makeup and behav­ior of our per­sonal iden­tity is at hand—what it is, where it comes from, how it works, who con­trols it, how peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions use and value it. As a direct result of this trans­for­ma­tion, the expe­ri­ence peo­ple have of per­sonal identity—both their own and the iden­ti­ties of others—is chang­ing rapidly. As design­ers of the blended dig­i­tal, social, and mate­r­ial expe­ri­ences of every­ware, we must under­stand the chang­ing nature of per­sonal iden­tity. And now that human­ity itself is within the design hori­zon, it is espe­cially impor­tant for design to under­stand the shift­ing expe­ri­ence of dig­i­tal identity.

The sec­ond part will look at the impli­ca­tions of these changes for our expe­ri­ence of iden­tity.  As I put together my pre­dic­tions for what iden­tity will be like in 10 years, I wel­come input — what do you think?

The most important question facing the augmented reality community – one whose answer will shape the future of AR – is content creation. Put simply, it’s a question of Who can create What kind of content, and How they will create it.  At the moment, a noticeable gap separates those who can create AR experiences from those who cannot.  High barriers to entry in the form of skills, technology, or expense like those in front of AR are acceptable for a new medium at the early stages of development, but in the long run, making it easy for all those people who don’t know a fiduciary marker from fiduciary trust to easily create valuable experiences for themselves and others is far more important to the viability of AR than resolving any of the many conceptual, design, or technological challenges visible at the moment.

In fact, unless the AR community makes it easy for ordinary people to create and share meaningful content broadly, I wager augmented reality will remain a marketer’s overworked dray horse in the near and middle term future. And in the long term, augmented reality experiences will become at best an interface lens [as Adam Greenfield suggests here] supporting specialized visualization needs and a limited range of interactions (with correspondingly limited value), all built around resources originating from elsewhere within the ubiquitous digital experience ecosystem.

I think this is a ‘negative outome’ for AR only because I see so much potential. As a class of experiences, augmented reality has the potential to change our understanding of the world we are immersed in at every moment, but only rarely apprehend in a way that makes informed interaction with people and the environment possible. As Tish Shute noted in her recent interview with Bruno Uzzan, I see the collection of tools, technologies, and concepts affiliated under the banner of augmented reality as the leading ambassador for ubiquitous computing and the weird world of everyware that is rising around us.

Recent developments show progress towards bridging the gap. First is Mobilizy’s proposal of a common markup language – ARML [Augmented Reality Markup Language], based on KML – to the Augmented Reality Consortium.  Setting aside all other questions about ARML, the primary content creation problem I see with this approach is the explicitly geographic frame of reference in KML.  Most people simply do not think in the same terms used by geolocative schemes.  When I ask how far it is to the market, and someone replies “4 minutes north”, they’re not thinking in minutes of latitude….  But rather than attempt to reorient the GIS / GEO location worldview to one that’s more natural in human terms, I think the pragmatic solution is a translation layer in the creation experience that avoids coordinates or other non-natural lcoative schemes, much as domain names overlay or broker IP addresses.  As an example, recall how the travel service Dopplr prompts you to enter the name of a place, suggests likely matches from a library of defined and managed place names, and only then addresses the coordinates associated with that location.

In addition, ARML will need some sort of ability to capture markup that is *not* dependent on geographic reference.  This may seem counterintuitive for a medium that aims to augment reality (which is, after all, a place), but remember that people also orient themselves in terms of other people, time, activity, identifier, etc.  Hanging everything that augments reality off of the geographic skeleton will result in instant reference scheme hackery on an immense scale.  At the least, AR content creation experiences based on ARML will need some means of invoking other reference schemes.

The second development is Layar’s launch of buildAR.com, a public web-based content creation tool that supports map based interaction that extends the model for creation experiences beyond coordinate tagged text data.  BuildAR.com is an early stage tool, but it marks a step toward the evolution towards the goal of reflexivity; the stage of maturity wherein it is possible for people who are unaware of the structure and concepts that define the medium to easily use tools provided within the medium to create experiences.  In McCLuhanesque terms, this effectively entails making provision for using the medium to extend itself.

I’m talking about both direct and indirect creation pathways for augmented content, though the emphasis is on the direct end of the continuum.  Indirect creation could take many forms, such as translating existing geolocative tags or appending ARML metadata to existing digital content items; perhaps social objects like photos, tweets, hotel reviews, or recipes.  Or content that is created as a result of Google Wave, or the instrumentation of urban settings, and our basic economic processes.  (A deep dive into the question of direct vs. indirect content creation pathways would require mapping out the potential augmented content ecosystem of linked data, and assessing each type of data from the cloud of apis / services / sources using tbd criteria.)

Addressing the content creation gap is critical because enabling broad-based creation of augmented experiences will speed up experimentation for all the supporting models that need to evolve: business and revenue, data ownership, technical, conceptual, etc. Evolution is needed here; the early models for content creation include advertiser only (a default in the experimental stage for media where marketers and advertisers are pioneers), subscription based, open source, and nonprofit (academic and otherwise).  None of these yet offers the right combination of convenience and context, the implacable twin giants who rule the domain of value judgments made by digital consumers and co-creaters.

Guidelines for Content Creation Experiences

So what should the AR community offer to close the creation gap?  We’ve learned a lot about what works in broad-based content creation from the evolution of blogging and other mainstream platforms for social interaction.  Without considering it extensively, the guidelines for a content creation experience (mind, I’m not discussing the technical enablers) are:

• No cost of entry: Creating content cannot require spending money (at least for basic capability), as the effort involved is already an investment.
• No cognitive overhead: Creating content cannot require understanding new abstract concepts, mastering tools with low usability, learning complex languages or terminology, etc.
• No maintenance: Creation tools must act like self-maintaining services, i.e. tools that do not require effort or attention
• No accessibility barriers: For global adoption, content creation experiences need to be accessible, which means low-bandwidth, multi-lingual, cross-media, and platform agnostic.

This is a starting list, but it captures the essence of the offerings that have been successful in the past.

In addition to the experience, the content that people create needs to follow some guidelines.

• Addressable: Including findability and searchability, AR content must be fully addressable by a broad spectrum of tools and protocols.  AR will fail at bridging the real and digital if the content people create for augmented experiences  cannot – at least partially – be addressed across this boundary, which is what makes AR an enchanted window rather than a simple browser / UI lens.  This seems like the simplest of these guidelines (after all, what isn’t addressable in a digital space?), but I think in the end it will be quite challenging to realize.
• Interoperable: Content must work across platforms, formats, and browsers, in terms of creation, sharing, and management.
• Portable: Content must be movable or portable for people to make the effort of creation; it cannot be confined to a single storage location, service, tool, owner, etc.  This touches on the familiar questions of data ownership and the commons.

The goal of these suggestions is to push AR toward maturity and broader adoption as quickly as possible, using lessons from the evolution of the Web.  What suggestions for guidelines for content creation experiences and the nature of AR content do you have?

If I am off base in thinking the creation barrier critical at this early stage of augmented reality’s rise above the experimental waterline, then what is more important?

Since I wrote about the user experience of augmented reality less than two weeks ago, the most important development is the arrival of augmented iPhone apps (unofficially for the moment, officially in September).

Why is this so important, when Wikitude and other AR Android apps have been available for almost a year?  Bringing augmented reality to the iPhone changes the cultural assumptions made about AR experiences as a class of offering. Endorsing AR experiences for iPhone users moves augmented reality from the geek realm of Android and Google, to the chic world of Apple.  Culturally, the assumptions we make about the new products and services from Apple and Google are driven largely by the differences in way we perceive the two brands.  Apple is chic, while Google is geek.

Looking Ahead

Connecting the Apple brand to augmented experiences will persuade many people to try out AR.  Yet as I’ve said, and many others as well, getting the user experience of augmented reality ‘right’ is absolutely the critical element to the long term viability of this new class of experiences.  This entails two efforts.

First, designers must refine the experiences offered by all those AR applications based on the four classic interaction patterns known so far – Head-Up Display, Tricorder, Holochess, and X-ray Vision.  Two factors make refinement essential: competition from other AR offerings that reduces the novelty value of your experience, and increased ‘load’ on the UX in the form of actual use for everyday purposes in the complex setting of real life.  Think about trying to choose where to get lunch for the afternoon by sorting through 1500 listings for coffee shops and restaurants while standing on a street corner in the rain in London holding your phone aloft.  The functional aspects of AR experiences just aren’t refined enough to handle the interaction design, visualization, and contextual sensitivity challenges implied. [Prediction: AR usage cases will naturally settle on a set of common scenarios that balance the strengths and weaknesses of each of the four classic patterns.  More speculation on that in a later post.]

Second, designers must address the gaps in the set of concepts now used as the basis for imagining new augmented experiences.  I flagged six ‘missing’ patterns in the range of experiences offered so far; Loner, Second Hand Smoke, Pay No Attention To the Man Behind the Curtain, The Invisible Man!, Tunnel Vision, and AR for AR’s Sake (see the article for details).  I’m sure the very savvy readers of this blog can identify even more.

I hope all the AR innovators, designers, and entrepreneurs working hard on the crest of this breaking wave of technology find ways to take on both of these tasks.  If they can’t refine the existing models and fill in those experience gaps, then neither Apple chic nor Google geek cred will suffice to make augmented reality viable in the long term.  And what could literally be a new way of seeing the world – one with legitimate potential for changing our behavior with regard to urban spaces, the environment, social structures, play, and economics, among just a few spheres of human activity – will remain little more than a camera obscura style curiosity.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb links to Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality (the latest Everyware column) in two recent stories tracking the fast-moving augmented reality space; Augmented Reality: Five Bariers to a Web That’s Everywhere and, and RobotVision: A Bing-powered iPhone Augmented Reality Browser. 

Thanks, Marshall!

And as a bonus, Tim O’Reilly tweeted about Marshall’s article.  I doubt that Tim reads this feed, but it’s always nice to be recognized, even indirectly.

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

In a world that’s moving so fast it’s hard to keep track of when you are, let alone where, there’s a need for experiences that move at more relaxed paces. This basic need for deliberately moderated and human-speed experiences better tuned to the way that people make and understand meaning is the origin of the Slow Food movement.

Naturally, there’s room for a virtual analog of slow food. I’m calling this kind of mediated experience that flows at a kinder, gentler pace “slow media”. Dawdlr, “a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: what are you doing, you know, more generally?” is a good example.

Assembled one postcard at a time, Dawdlr exemplifies the collective form of Slow Media, one you can contribute to by creating some content using a standard interface and then submitting it for publication, as long as it carried the proper postage. The paper blog – now updated and known as papercast – might be a precursor.

What are some other examples of Slow Media? Back in January of 2007, AdBusters asked, “Isn’t it time to slow down?” during their national slowdown week.

Slow food has a website, annual gatherings, publications, a manifesto, even a mascot / icon – the snail of course. What’s next for slow media? Maybe a slow wiki, made up of image-mapped screen shots of chalkboards with writing?

For regular readers wondering about the recent quiet here, a notice that Boxes and Arrows will shortly publish an article I’ve been working on for a while in the background, titled, “It Seemed Like the Thing To Do At the Time: The Power of State of Mind”. This is the written version of my panel presentation Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs from the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas.

I’ve written about organizations and failure – Signs of Crisis and Decline In Organizations – in this blog before (a while ago, but still a popular posting), and wanted to consider the subject on a larger level. With the rapid spread of social software / social media and the rise of complex social dynamics in on-line environments, exploring failure at the level of an entire society is timely.

In The Fishbowl

Failed or failing societies are an excellent fishbowl for observers seeking patterns related to social media, for two reasons. First, the high intensity of failure situations reveals much of what is ordinarily hidden in social structures and patterns: Impending collapse leads people to dispense with carefully maintained social constructions.

One source of this heightened intensity is the greatly increased stakes of societal failure (vs. most other kinds), which often means sudden and dramatic disruptions to basic living and economic patterns, the decline of cities and urban concentrations, and dramatic population decrease. Another source is the very broad scope of the aftereffects; because a failing society involves an entire culture, the affects are comprehensive, touching everyone and everything.

Secondly, societies often command substantial qualitative and quantitative resources that can help them manage crisis or challenges, thereby averting failure. Smaller, less sophisticated entities lack the resource base of a complex social organism, and consequently cannot put up as much of a fight.

Examples of resources available at the level of a society include:

• Leaders and planners dedicated to focusing on the future
• Large amounts of accumulated knowledge and experience
• Sophisticated structures for decision making and control
• Mechanisms for maintaining order during crises
• Collective resilience from surviving previous challenges
• Substantial stores of resources such as food and materials, money, land
• Tools, methods, and organizations providing economies of scale, such as banking and commerce networks
• Systems for mobilizing labor for special purposes
• Connections to other societies that could provide assistance (or potential rescue)

Despite these mitigating resources, the historical and archeological records overflow with examples of failed societies. Once we read those records, the question of how these societies defined themselves seems to bear directly on quite a few of the outcomes.

I discuss three societies in the article: Easter Island, Tikopia, and my own small startup company. We have insight into the fate of Easter Island society thanks to a rich archeological record that has been extensively studied, and descriptions of the Rapa Nui society in written records kept by European explorers visiting since 1722. Tikopia of course is still a functioning culture. My startup was a tiny affair that serves as a useful foil because it shows all the mistakes societies make in a compressed span of time, and on a scale that’s easy to examine. The Norse colonies in North America and Greenland are another good example, though space constraints didn’t allow discussion of their failed society in the article.

Read the article to see what happens to all three!

Semi Random Assortment of Quotations

In the meantime, enjoy this sampling of quotations about failure, knowledge, and self, from some well-known – and mostly successful! – people.

“Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.” – ALBERT EINSTEIN

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – CHARLES DARWIN

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” – EPICTETUS

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – THOMAS EDISON

“It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.” – HAVELOCK ELLIS

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.” – ANAIS NIN

“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.” – RABINDRANATH TAGORE

“Whoever longs to rescue quickly both himself and others should practice the supreme mystery: exchange of self and other.” – SHANTIDEVA

“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” – JOHN DEWEY

Direct connections between the war in Iraq and the realm of user experience are rare, so I was surprised when one popped up today in an article by the New York Times, titled 2 Car Bombings in Iraq Kill 25.

The article quotes an Iraqi, reacting to the destruction of a house containing a cache of munitions by American soldiers.  “The Americans are lying,” said Ali Jabbar, 28, one of several men digging through the rubble, where bicycle handlebars could be seen poking out. “If there were weapons there, they should have taken pictures to prove it.” But in a sign of the challenge Americans face here, Mr. Jabbar said that even if he saw such pictures, he would not be convinced that the destruction was justified. “The Americans can make it up with Photoshop,” he said.

It’s simultaneously terrible and fascinating that a tool I use regularly would appear in this sort of context. And yet it’s not unreasonable, given the ways that many futurists envision and describe warfare centered on information.

Here’s Alvin Toffler, from How will future wars be fought?

Above all, the full implications of what we termed Third Wave “knowledge warfare” have not yet been digested – even in the United States. The wars of the future will increasingly be prevented, won or lost based on information superiority and dominance. And that isn’t just a matter of taking out the other guy’s radar. It means waging the kind of full-scale cyber-war we described in War and Anti-War. Cyber-war involves everything from strategic deception and perception management down to tactical disruption of an adversary’s information systems. It also means understanding the role played by the global media in any conflict today. It means enhancing all your knowledge assets from intelligence, to research and development, training, and communication.