A few years back I came across a very interesting article by Phil Agre , Associate Professor of Information Studies at UCLA. I liked that article so much that I kept in my mail box for about 6 years until I discovered it a few days ago.
He talked about a very interesting anti establishment approach to innovation much like how the child with its not-yet-formed perception about the real world and the object-identity relationships, wants to break down the definition of an object in unadulterated inquisitiveness. He also elaborated how the perception and the acceptability of a technology product in the market chase up to a crescendo, create wide-spread fad and then goes bust. And resurfaces again with new perceptions significantly reoriented by the hard lessons in the past. He sees a pattern in these cycles and tries to define an inherent trait in the user and producer communities to rediscover themselves from time to time with a deep reflection in the subsequent form & functionality in the design. He effectively uses the metaphor of a cell phone to illustrate his insight.
Blow up your cell phone
by Phil Agre, UCLA
In the United States, much has been said about the dot-com meltdown. In Europe, however, the salient meltdown is in wireless. Government regulators auctioned off spectrum for broadband wireless services, and a combination of clever auction design and speculative mania drove prices to insane levels. Now large parts of the European wireless industry is imploding. The Japanese industry is doing better; at least they, unlike the Europeans, have some proven applications for their current-generation wireless services. But the assumption that people will dive into broadband wireless just because it’s there is not proving true. Time and again, industry seems surprised by how long it takes to establish critical mass for a new standard in the market. The Internet was misleading in this regard; its sudden growth resulted partly from pent-up demand during the period of “acceptable use” policies. The point, in any case, is that the wireless industry is driving off a cliff.
At the most basic level, the cell phone industry has lost the simplest driver of innovation: reducing the size of the handset. Cell phones are now so small that, barring sharp turns in human evolution, they’d be useless any smaller. They can be made cheaper, of course, and from different materials, but we are rapidly heading to a world where cell phones as such are no more exciting an industry than calculators.
So where should cell phone design head next? Part of the problem is simply industry habit: except in Japan, whose experience does not seem to generalize, cell phones have been used almost exclusively for two applications, voice communications and text messaging, and the latter application isn’t even widely used in the United States. The market has been unified by a few standards and a lot of price competition.
The future will be different. I’d like to see the whole concept of a “cell phone” blow up. A “cell phone” as we know it now is a bundle of functionalities: microphone, speaker, buttons, display, internal software, and various elements of the communications protocol between the handset and the base station, among others. Location-finding functionality is on the way. One direction of future development
already seems clear: instead of wiring the communications protocols into the hardware, generalizing both the software and the protocols with “software-defined radio” that can be changed dynamically. But another direction has had less attention: unbundling the functionality of the cell phone and then embedding various subsets and supersets of that functionality into a world of other devices. Taken together,
these approaches — software definition and unbundling-and-embedding
– can lead to a vast new design space.
Here are some possibilities. In Japan, I am told, radio stations give out radios that consist of nothing but a credit-card-sized piece of plastic with embedded electronics and a headphone jack. The radio is tuned permanently to the station that gave it out, so it doesn’t need a dial or display, and it’s only meant to be used with the headphones,so it doesn’t need a speaker. The same thing could be done with cell
phones. Imagine a small object with a headphone jack and a single button on it. When you push the button, it “dials” a pre-programmed number, such as a service that provides movie times. If interaction is needed then the button could be used, or else speech recognition.
If you add a microphone to the device then parents could buy it, program it with their own number, and give it to their children. It would be like a specialized calling card, except that it would include much of the functionality of the phone as well.
Unbundled cell phone functionality can also be embedded in personal technologies. If we imagine that we will all become cyborgs, carrying around a mess of suitably streamlined gear, all of whose components talk to one another, then the “cell phone” will surely need to talk to personal sensors, databases, display screens, and so on. These personal technologies could communicate with other services over
the network. This sort of thing has been explored by the wearable commputing people. What has been less explored is the main good purpose for such services: maintaining awareness of the many people and institutions with which we have ongoing relations: the kids at day care, the public personae of our professional acquaintances, the ball scores, the bus we hope to board, the discussion groups we monitor, and so on. (Traditional HCI research has drawn some lessons about
maintaining real-time awareness of work collaborators that presumably carry over to wearable services.)
Another assumption of the industry has been that cell phones are for mobility. But from an unbundling-and-embedding perspective this need not be true. Imagine a historical battlefield. At each point where something important happened, the rangers have installed a green post with a button and a speaker, and maybe a video display or other more imaginative kinds of interactive devices. The green post now has a cell phone embedded in it, or certain functionalities of a cell phone. The rangers use it to manage the interpretive “content” at a distance, for example updating it when new scholarship becomes available or else extending it with special features for significant historical dates, material in other languages, and so on. The posts could also include public-address capabilities (“the park closes in half an hour”) or emergency call functions, etc. In this case, the “phone” sits still, being tied to a significant place, even as the people move around. The posts could also interact with “augmented reality” gear that is carried by the park visitors, for example by projecting diagrams or animation onto the landscape.
The “cell phone” functionality could also be embedded in objects. Warehouses already have a world of tracking technologies, such as RFID tags embedded in the boxes, for keeping track of where particular items are stored. (This is a serious problem for warehouse people, and large objects get lost in warehouses all the time.) With time, the object tracking devices could converge with the unbundled-and-embedded cell phone. It would then be possible to pose much more general queries to the objects, for example embedding sensors in the contents of the boxes to assure their environmental conditions, run periodic tests on stored electronics, etc. Of course, when an object “phones home” across an institutional boundary, for example between a consumer who owns a washing machine and the manufacturer that sold it, the relationship across that boundary becomes more complicated. It will be necessary to design the relationship along with the technology.
It is evident, I hope, that the design space of the the unbundled-and-embedded cell phone is quite large. It should be possible to look at a particular application area and brainstorm a spectrum of possible applications, each requiring different subsets or supersets of cell phone functionalities. That very diversity will pose a significant
challenge to the cell phone industry. Look at the experience so far with WAP. WAP may well succeed — its poor showing so far may simply be another manifestation of industry’s tendency to underestimate how long it will take to establish a new standard in the market. But WAP itself and the WAP coalition display every warning sign. Not enough attention was paid to interface design, and the wireless industry did
not understand how to build the alliances needed to make the various WAP applications really work as businesses. They had lots of demos, lots of start-ups, but little serious market acceptance.
What was needed, and missing, is a robust feedback loop between applications experience and the basic design of the standards. Usability problems became critical late in the day, rather than being at the core of the design process. Unlike the traditional cell phone applications of voice and text messaging, a platform like WAP succeeds only if it achieves economies of scale twice over: first in each of a large number of applications domains, so as to make each of the applications viable, and then in the applications taken as a whole, to make WAP services viable in general, for example generating demand for WAP-enabled handsets.
The unbundle-and-embed design paradigm makes the situation both easier and harder. On the one hand, if it really is possible to disassemble the existing cell phone architecture and embed some of the components into other systems, then that can only help the existing architecture redouble its current economies of scale. On the other hand, if that unbundling-and-embedding strategy becomes economically central to the industry, then it will surely place signficant pressures on the future
development of the architecture: the same problem as WAP, only worse.
As the trend toward embedded services unfolds, the design process will have to change. History suggests why. The initial telephones were fixed in place, either fastened to phone booths or tethered by wires. For many years one could speak of a person as “waiting by the telephone” because the telephone was a place. Cell phones changed that, as phones become attached to people. But the functionality of the phone remained much the same, and the designer didn’t need to know much about the phone user’s way of life. As cell phones acquire more features, more knowledge about users becomes necessary, and as cell phone functionalities are unbundled and embedded, the resulting services will become intertwined with the patterns of their users’ lives. This, it seems to me, is the main line of development in the history of communications services: a progressive intertwining between communications services and the lives of the people who use them.
It follows that the design process of the future will require a more sophisticated understanding of the user community. This starts with anthropological fieldwork, and it includes participatory design processes, mock-ups and prototypes, and systematic mapping-out of the whole universe of potential applications niches. A good place to start, as I’ve mentioned in the context of wearable devices, is with relationships. Think of the unbundled-and-disembedded cell phone functionalities not as devices for making phone calls, but as infrastructures for maintaining relationships. What is the informational architecture of a user’s ongoing relationship with a family member, a school, a doctor, a video game company, and so on, and what could those architectures become? What issues, privacy for example, are at stake in the design and ongoing renegotiation of that architecture? How can the design process be part-and-parcel of the large-scale cultural process by which people reimagine their lives and choose once again the relationships that make them up?
‘Design for Intent‘ is increasingly attracting attention. And it is coming out of the traditional context of Brand research & Communication. From new technology offerings to lifestyle products, everyone wants you to adapt yourself to their new proposed ‘way’ of doing things. Some of these are very forced and while the others are more subtle. In your everyday life there are so many things you do as a part of routine and interestingly these (often boring) routines or chores disappear from your consciousness as you include them in your sub-conscious patterns.
Recent 
Recent comments