In the past few weeks there have been a number of news articles and at least four kerjillion blog posts regarding robots and the future of humanity. Robots that power themselves with organic matter, robots that can run like an animal, and snake robots that can hump human legs are all pretty cool, but there’s also a related narrative that we, as humans, don’t know how to deal with sentient robots.

The thing is, we’ve had unstoppable, zombie-like, intelligent actors capable of taking out a single human for at least a century. They have legal status, can own property, can file lawsuits, own weapons, have security forces, and they self-replicate based on available resources.

They’re called “corporations”.

A corporation has almost all the rights of an individual human, save for voting. But in most other ways, they’re better than any single human. They can store and process data in vast quantities and faster than a single human. They can make intelligent decisions about how they interact with you based on your purchasing history, your medical history, your entertainment preferences, and your social networking activities. A corporation can not only repair itself, it can survive financial death via various forms of bankruptcy and self-replication. If a corporation gets too big, it can split into a group of more efficiently sized corporations that can coordinate efforts with one another.

I’m not worried about a future where sentient robot dogs that feed on the dead stalk the streets at night.

I’m worried about a now where corporations trick humans into paying as much for a liter of bottled tap water as they do for a liter of milk.

Technorati Tags: future, robots, sustainability

Last week, we bought yet-another-cordless-phone after the GE died and the replacement handset would never sync properly with the base station. This time, I decided to go with a Panasonic, as some similar models had received good ratings in Consumer Reports and Costco had them for cheap.

Setting them up, I was happy to discover that instead of some cordless phone specific battery, they use regular NiMH AAA batteries. Plentiful and cheap when the time comes to replace them.

Now if I could just get a set of schematics and a parts list so we’d have a chance of repairing the phone itself, maybe I’d have a phone that I could maintain over the long run…

Technorati Tags: batteries, design, sustainability

Here’s one example: luggage. In the states, luggage is all about ease of movement through airports or accessories that make your luggage clip to other luggage and so on. The problem is, “how do I move a bunch of bags from my house to the airport to the hotel and back again?” and the answer is the latest and greatest products from Victorinox, Samsonite, and their ilk.

In Japan, this problem is solved with an actual service, not better luggage. It’s trivial to drop your luggage off at the airport and have it delivered to your hotel, or delivered from your hotel to another hotel or back to the airport. Within Japan, we travelled only with overnight bags, our massive luggage were dropped off at the front desk of one hotel and delivered to our room at the next.

I don’t think that someone actually said, “how can we solve the luggage problem” as much as someone saw a business opportunity. Yamato Transport doesn’t just move luggage, they move pretty much anything from one point to another. Services instead of consumable products were everywhere. Instead of a stack of napkins at the restaurant, we were given steamed hand-towels. Instead of a bunch of signs at a construction site warning passersby of danger, a real, live human apologized for the inconvenience and directed traffic as needed.

When we checked in to our hotel — jetlagged and confused — we discovered a few other little touches that made a huge difference in our stay and how we thought about our environment. After finding our room and dumping our luggage, we were confused by the fact that the power was out. It took us a few minutes to find the slot by the door where you store your (RFID enabled) room key. When you’re in the room, you put your key in the slot, and the power is turned on for your room. When you leave and take the key with you, everything except the fridge and the washer/dryer are automatically powered down. Not only do you always know where you room key is, but you get a daily reminder of how much energy is wasted by standby power or lights that were accidentally left on.

We were also happy to find that our hotel had a “washlet“, and by the end of our stay we were trying to figure out how to smuggle one home. And also wondering if, perhaps, the Japanese think we’re a bunch of dirty savages when it comes to bathroom hygiene. I’m sure the toilet paper industry would not be happy about the mass adoption of washlets in the States, but I think it’s something that’d probably be better for us (and the environment) in the long run. Washlets are another case of the “service instead of commodity” thinking — instead of buying the best/nicest toilet paper you can afford by the pallet at Costco, why not have a toilet that does most of the cleaning for you?

I’ll end on a question that popped into my head while trying to find a trashcan on the streets of Tokyo,

“Can you design a solution that doesn’t create new consumption patterns?”

[0] For the purposes of simplicity, I’m not going to try and guess whether it was a service designer, interaction designer, UE designer, industrial designer, or whatever designer that designed things that I used.

Technorati Tags: design, japan

This time when I visited the Apple store, there was no mention of repair — the only option presented to me was that if I recycle it, I could get %10 off of a new iPod. So, what’s changed? Why is Apple more interested in selling me a new iPod that only holds marginally more media instead of charging me a fair chunk of change to replace the battery in the old one. The rumor is they don’t make profit on the iPod and that it’s subsidized by iTunes sales. Is the hope that in selling me a larger iPod, they increase the amount of sales, and does adding half-again as much space really make that much profit?

So here’s the design issue — why isn’t the iPod designed to be easily repaired by someone at the Genius bar? It’s trivial to swap out the battery in my state of the art Android G1 and it’s been trivial to swap out the battery in almost every mobile phone or mobile HT I’ve owned. I’m trying to remember the last bit of consumer electronics I owned that didn’t allow me to swap out the battery and I’m drawing a blank.

So what’s up, Apple? As a socially responsible company, why aren’t you designing products that can be maintained by the customer instead of designing products that have to be replaced?

Technorati Tags: apple, design, sustainability

For awhile now, I’ve been interested in physical and electronic security and the relationship they have with personal privacy. A large part of my day job for the past 8 years has involved privacy and computer security and I’ve been involved in some sort of security or hacking efforts since the 8-bit days. There are interesting areas of overlap where tradeoffs are made between security and privacy, and as I study design in a formal setting, I’m beginning to see the tradeoffs that will be made with design. While I’ve always been a proponent of security not getting in the way of usability, I didn’t worry too much about what “usability” actually meant and as a hacker, I was basically happy with with something that worked and was efficient.

In design school I’m learning design-thinking, which I’m discovering is similar to hacker-thinking (more on that in a future post). An interesting difference I’ve discovered is that as a hacker, I’m happy if it works. As a designer, I’m not happy until I’m no longer able to improve things. There’s a big leap between “it works well enough” and “it works and I can’t make it any better”, looking back at past hacking projects I can see now how much further I could have gone.

I’m also learning how to better communicate my ideas to people before I go off and act upon them. Hacking has always been about doing something, design is very much thinking about doing something and communicating the idea to people who do things. I want to do both. I want to show someone 20 variations on an idea using sketches, get useful feedback, then go off and do/make something to implement the idea.

For the Fall semester of mTID, I wanted to explore interaction design as it relates to learning about one’s physical and electronic surroundings. I didn’t want to go the AR route and wander around holding a mobile in front of my face or staring down into a tricorder; I wanted some sort of physical or tactile output device that feeds me information as an interrupt based on external triggers. Specifically, something that would let me know that I needed to be paying attention or that I should focus my attention in a specific direction but that was not always on at some idle setting or feeding me information that I have to parse as “negative/off”.

After looking at research in the field of haptic/tactile outputs, I also decided to take on the constraint of COTS technology, preferably open source hardware and software. I want other people to be able to replicate my work using free/cheap hardware and software instead of having to buy expensive mil-spec hardware or developing their own technology. There are teams of people with budgets doing some really interesting things, but I’m one person working in a self-funded studio.

Based loosely on what others have done, I ended up making a few waist-belts and arm-bands using Lilypad Vibe Boards driven by Arduino microcontrollers. The bands and belts are adjustable and can handle between 1 and 16 Vibe Boards. After getting all that up and running, I hooked it to a HM55B compass and did some basic navigation experiments and added a command-line interface to make it easy to manipulate individual Vibe Boards from outside the Arduino.

The thing that surprised me the most was the difference between what was reported in the literature and my personal experiences when it comes to using vibrators on a belt or band. Belts are a bit of a pain and have to be significantly readjusted and calibrated based on different individuals and the clothes they are wearing. For people who aren’t skinny, there are also issues with some of the vibe boards not making contact across the small of the back and for people who wear their pants at the wrong height it can often end up being a “torso band”. However, I was able to get some good practical experience with perceptual issues and concepts like the difficulty of supporting “just noticeable difference” between different wearers.

Due to the number of problems with the belt being used between different people, I started focusing on a band worn on the upper arm. My hope was that it would be easier to adjust and reconfigure, and that turned out to be the case. The arm-band also confirmed a problem that I’d first noticed during work developing the belt: vibrators are great for active feedback during a focused task or a high-priority alert but not so good for low-level alerts or the occasional nudge.

During debugging I noticed that I often startled myself by having a buzzer in my hand or resting on my skin go off, even when I was trying to figure out why it wasn’t powering up. Invariably, I’d drop the buzzer or flinch, even though I was expecting it to do something. (See also the classic “joy buzzer” prank.) My intuition is that we respond to surprise buzzing in a negative manner because of bees and other buzzing insects that can hurt us and that this is why almost every signal I’ve generated has seemed so negative if it happened unexpectedly.

However, having something seem like a surprise or creating a feeling of being startled is almost the exact opposite of what I’m trying to accomplish. My goal is to generate feedback at a less-critical level to alert a person of some information of interest, possibly including an abstract concept. I’m interested more in how to physically relate the sentence, “Hey, maybe you want to look in this direction for something suspicious that might also be hidden” and not the short imperative, “RUN! IT’S A LION!”

So now I’m looking at psych and HCI research again and considering combining vibrations with other tactile feedback. Perhaps a small solenoid that gets the wearer’s attention by “tapping them on the shoulder” then providing more information via the vibrators, or perhaps I can figure out a way to ramp up the vibrations slowly enough that someone isn’t startled.

As frustrating as this semester has been in terms of slow progress, setbacks, and dead-end tangents, I still feel like I’m learning a huge amount in a very short time. Once summer is here, I’m looking forward to some reflection time to sort out what I’ve really learned and how I can use it in the future.

Technorati Tags: arduino, design, haptic, ixd, lilypad, mTID

A “time machine” radio that allows you tune into a year instead of a radio frequency.

Technorati Tags: arduino, design, interaction, sketching

I’m the first to admit that I have a problem with constructive criticism. I’ve never been terribly good at gently nudging someone onto the right path with kind words; I’m much better at beating them with a stick when they go down the wrong path. I apologize in advance if this comes off as harsh, it’s really not my intent. I want us to be brilliant, I don’t want to score points by pointing out where people are screwing up.

I recently started reading RISD’s latest blog (yes, they have more than one), “RISD by Design” and my response was something like

“Oh yeah? Well we just updated our website design after 10 years! So there! Ok, well, we updated some of it, like the main page and a couple other things and a lot of the departments and the search engine still have the old style and there’s not much visual coherence across the campus other than.. uh… so, how about those Stillers?”

That’s not much of a response. As a matter of fact, it made me angry thinking about it.

How is it that a university doing leading-edge research in pretty much every domain including Internet technology (ex: CAPCHA) doesn’t have any sort of, “Hey, look at us!” blog or journal at the university level?

Sure, there are some people working on departmental and project blogging, but that’s a local level. Peter Lee has CSDiary that covers the activities of the CS department and Golan Levin has a personal blog where he talks about issues related to teaching and being a good student. CMU Design has a Twitter feed, which is really great for students in Design, and a couple of classes have had per-class blogs.

But where’s our flagship blog, authored by someone from the President’s Office or at least someone in PR? Why were we not one of the first universities to have a major public blog/journal?

Thinking about past organizations I’ve been in, some possible answers that come to mind:

• We don’t have to. Admission to Carnegie Mellon is highly competitive, anyone we want as a student or donor already knows who we are. There’s simply nothing to be gained from investing in some sort of Maeda-like showcase blog.
• It’s not a high enough priority. Various senior people think it’s important, but we have limited resources and can’t do everything we want to do.
• It’s a bad idea. For whatever reason, enough people at senior levels are simply opposed to the idea of having a presence in blog-space that they can block anyone else who wants to make progress in this area.
• We don’t think the contemporary online world is relevant to the education process.

I’d like to think it’s the first reason (“we’re so great we don’t need to advertise”) but on my grumpy days I suspect that it’s one of the latter.

Here’s why.

Last semester I helped with a class called Making Things Interactive. If you go look at the class blog, you might notice that it’s hosted at wordpress.com, not at cmu.edu.

Why? Well, we don’t have any blogging infrastructure at CMU. Nada. Zip.

Individual people have individual accounts on the campus network and some folk have installed blogging software on their accounts. However, the bandwidth limitations are pretty tight as my fellow student Jennifer Gooch found out the hard way. When her project One Cold Hand got national press, her site got hammered and was quickly shut down by IT because it was using too much bandwidth. It took several days to convince people within the system to change her bandwidth limits, during which she ended up moving her site to another hosting facility.

Think about that a second or two: We were getting really good PR on a national level for a student’s work and that student’s account got locked down because too many people found her work interesting.

Of course, many groups/departments have their own computing resources and self-host their servers, but by doing this they’re duplicating effort and wasting resources. In my program there’s a tiny little *nix box sitting in someone’s office running yet-another install of gentoo/apache and some custom CMS software. Why can’t we just fill out some sort of web requisition form and get a wordpress install up and running on a hosted campus facility? I host several sites (including this one) at dreamhost, so I can honestly say that it’s pretty trivial to set up a domain and get blogging software up and running if the basic infrastructure is in place.

In the short term, what we need is a blogfarm running Wordpress. We don’t need CS to go into NIH mode and create yet another parallel-but-different-solution, we just need a bunch of blades in racks running wordpress and some support from IT in the keeping-it-running-and-updated department. Even if the Powers That Be don’t get blogging, at least give those of us who do the infrastructure we need to set up and run blogs on local, supported servers.

Once the infrastructure is up and running and people are using it and we start getting attention, we can more easily convince the Powers That Be why blogging/journaling is so important to the future success of our university. If a mere art school like RISD (sorry, cheap shot, I know :-) has a public face in the online world, why doesn’t a cutting edge, interdisciplinary research university like Carnegie Mellon have a public face that’s an order of magnitude better?

I have negative free time to help with this sort of thing, but my program could really use a locally hosted blog/website where we could show off all of our work. Right now I’m looking at setting up something on ning to promote our program and asking my advisor to spend a few $ to make the ads go away; I’m more than happy to help someone who has the time/energy to lead this charge.

So. Time to “shut up and skate”, as we said back in the day. I don’t have time to help build a ramp, but I’m happy to help sweep leaves out of an empty pool.

Technorati Tags: blogs, cmu, risd

I’m not sure if I agree with ACCD’s Ken Zapinski opinions, but I really like his visualization of transporting people by bus vs. automobile.

Technorati Tags: mass transit, Pittsburgh, visualization

This morning I discovered Pachube, a “service that enables people to tag and share real time environmental data from objects, devices and spaces around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual.”

In the space of a few moments I looked at the river conditions in Bastrop, TX; humidity and “leaf wetness” in southern California; and data from various sensors in a home in Japan.

Ok, so poking around on a website is fun and all, but Pachube also will feed this data out. All I need to do to have my automated lights turn on and off in sync with those in the Japanese living room is pull a data feed from Pachube then use something like Arduino to drive the hardware.

What will be really interesting is when there are enough tag readers attached to something like this to track arbitrary objects through the network. Online package tracking will seem quaint by comparison.

Technorati Tags: arduino, pachube, rfid, spime

I didn’t actually “throw away” three pens as much as “dispose” of them or, in essence, “destroy” them. They’re not recyclable that I’m aware of and not refillable, either. So there’s 1.5 oz (yes, I weighed them) of plastic and a tiny bit of metal that I destroyed by sending to a landfill.

How much oil did I just destroy? Probably not that much. But those pens came in boxes, factories needed to make the ink used to color the plastic, all of that had to be delivered somewhere. Still, probably not that much oil for three pens.

On the other hand, how many pens have I destroyed in my life? I remember buying disposable ballpoints by the box in college, so I’m guessing a lot of pens, so maybe, what, a gallon of oil? A barrel of oil? I’m not going to go all Jamais Cascio and calculate the amount of oil I’ve destroyed in the form of ballpoint pens, but I’m going to hazard a guess it’s a non-trivial amount, especially if you include the fully-loaded cost of the designing, making, and distributing of the pens.

Side note: Years ago I switched to mechanical pencils just because I like the feel more. I still have some of the same mechanical pencils I bought seven or eight years ago — including my favorite, Ohto Pro-Mecha architecture pencils. I have worn out four of the Ohotos (all .3, I guess I have a heavy hand?) and need to fix/replace/recycle them. Of note, they’re made almost entirely of aluminum with only a small amount of plastic. If I can’t fix them, I can always toss the metal bit in the recycling bin with all the other metal scrap that I take to the dealer once or twice a year.

So, I threw away — destroyed — three pens yesterday. How many have I destroyed in my life? How many have you destroyed? How many have we collectively destroyed? How much oil have we collectively destroyed in the form of disposable pens?

BIC says they sell “24 million BIC(tm) stationery products every day” (emph. mine). They also say, “BIC(tm) products are the choice for any consumer who wants to protect the environment.”

Say what? If I want to protect the environment, why would I buy disposable pens and disposable lighters and disposable razors, all made using oil and intended to be destroyed instead of recycled or reused? I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe it’s actually bad for the environment (and a waste of money) to buy things knowing you’re just going to destroy them.

Ok, so how do I go about not destroying any more oil in the form of disposable pens? Let’s try the “reduce, re-use, recycle” solution.

Reduce: It’s difficult to reduce the amount of drawing and writing I need to do, but can I reduce the amount of pens I use? Is there an alternative to disposable pens? I like Prismacolor pencils, and they’re good for some of my drawing, and when I toss the shavings and the stub into the trash they’ll go to a landfill where maybe they’ll decompose. They are a bit of a pain to use on a plane or in a car as they have to be sharpened often and they’re also fragile — dropping them will break the core and make them useless. They also don’t work well with some paper and they aren’t as permanent as ink. Face it, I’m still going to need to use ink pens of some sort.

Reuse: Another option is to stop throwing away — destroying — the entire pen. Copic makes a number of pens that use refillable inserts and replaceable nibs. True, those go in the landfill once they’re empty/worn, but the body of the pen is metal and will last quite some time before getting tossed into the recycling bin. I’m still using one I bought several years ago, and I’ve replaced the ink and nib a few times now. (Copic also makes a wide variety of refillable/repairable markers along with disposable pens and markers.) When I was a kid, replacing the insert was pretty standard and I still have a couple of U.S.Gov. black ball-point pens that would work fine today had I a refill handy.

For note-taking in class and general writing, I’ve switched over completely to fountain pens that can be refilled from a bottle of ink. Yes, they can be a bit messy some times, but I’ve bought a few 3oz jars of Noodler’s water-resistant ink, enough to last me a kerjillion years. I suspect the nib on my pen will also last me most of the rest of my life as long as I don’t drop it on concrete or somesuch. If I didn’t like refilling I could buy ink cartridges, but again, I’m destroying oil when the cartridges are empty.

Recycle: Not an option with any of the disposable pens I’ve seen. If someone is making pens that I can put in with the #1 and #2 plastic (all my city takes), please let me know. I’m pretty certain none of the pens I destroyed yesterday were made of HDPE.

So, there’s my solution: fountain pens for most of my writing, Copic markers and Prismas for drawing. I suspect I can go the rest of my life without destroying nearly as much oil as I used to in the form of disposable pens.

Am I saying that people who use disposable pens are evil? No, and I’ll continue to use Sharpie Industrial disposable markers when I need to make semi-permanent marks in the shop. (However, I should buy them in bulk instead of in the three pack that uses paper and plastic packaging.)

What I am saying is that we destroy a lot of oil in the form of disposable pens, and that there are steps we can take to reduce the amount we’re destroying. Each of our solutions will be different, but collectively we can prevent a lot of oil from being destroyed.

Technorati Tags: oil, pens, recycling, sustainability

Technorati Tags: design, sustainability

Technorati Tags: artisinal design, sustainability

Papanek and Hennessey’s primary focus is on both needless consumption and poorly designed things that people really don’t need. However, instead of a long rant against conspicuous consumption and designed-in obsolescence, they point out flaws in products and systems then suggest alternatives. Starting with the home bath and ending with community-level resources (like fire engines), many things we take for granted or assume cannot be improved upon are looked at with a critical eye. Their line of questioning includes things like, “how can this be improved?”, “why don’t we do this the way people in another country do?” to “do you really need this thing in the first place?”

These questions are ones that I think anyone interested in design or sustainability should be learning to ask about everything they encounter. An interesting proposal in response to over-consumption is shared ownership of resources and objects that one only occasionally uses. We do this for all sorts of things, from fire engines to library books, but why do we stop with institutions created in the past century?

For example, why don’t we share lawnmowers?

I own two — a reel mower that I normally use and a gas mower given to us by a relative. Both of my neighbors also own gas mowers, and I think it’s a reasonable assumption that any of my neighbors who don’t hire a gardener probably own a gas mower. When I use my mower, it’s rarely for more than 20-30 minutes every other week or so; the same is true for all the mowers my neighbors own.

So why do we all have to own our own mower, each requiring a fair amount of regular maintenance even though we only use each for a few hours a week? What if we each put a few bucks a week into the “mower fund” and were able to check a mower out from a local storage shed? (Similar arguments are made for shared deep freezers in apartment buildings and other shared appliances.)

And if we are all going to own so many mowers, do we all need gas mowers? I’ve mowed my yard with both the reel mower and the gas mower, and the reel mower tends to be faster, quieter, and easier to store. Factor in down-time for refueling, tweaking the spark plug, and the cost of gas/oil, and the reel mower starts to make a lot more sense, at least for smaller lawns. I’m pretty certain that my reel mower will also last much longer than the gas mower, and it cost about half what a new gas mower would cost.

Taking their argument a step further, why do we have grass lawns that require so much maintenance to begin with? Just because they were popular with the Victorians doesn’t mean we need to waste water growing plants just to keep them closely cropped. On a personal level, we’ve started redesigning our own front yard so that we will no longer need to mow or water it other than occasional spot watering during a drought. It just doesn’t make sense for us to water and maintain 500 square feet of grass simply because it’s green.

It’s this sort of process and thinking that makes the book of value. While many of the specific suggestions they make are irrelevant today (such as rethinking typewriters), the processes Papanek and Hennessey use to critically look at the world around us and improve things for the better.

Cite (if you’re interested in my generating BiBTeX refs in future reviews, please speak up):
Hennessey, James and Papanek, Victor. Why Things Don’t Work, Pantheon Books, 1977, 0-394-70228-X

Technorati Tags: design, hennessey, papanek, sustainability

An area I get distracted by often is tools for nomadic living. I grew up moving around a fair bit and I’ve spent much of my adult life dragging around a portable office of one sort or another. It used to be a leather Day Runner(tm), notebooks, a Sony Walkman(tm) and random art supplies; these days it’s a laptop, tri-band ham radio, sketchbook, iPod(tm), and random tools for safety and personal care.

What I haven’t thought enough about is the next step up from the overstuffed courier bag, actually taking my entire house and all my possessions from place to place on a regular basis. It’s one thing to move my office from home to cafe every day, but moving all my stuff from town to town on a regular basis? That’s something a bit more complicated, especially given how much crap I (as well as everyone else) tend to own.

Becoming a truly nomadic person seems to boil down to two simple steps:

Step 1: Get rid of all the crap you don’t need or put it in some permanent place. You’re going to need to do this before you get to the next step…

Step 2: Own only those things that are easily transported and that you absolutely need. One thing that most of us absolutely need is a bare minimum of furniture, and that’s where Nomadic Furniture comes into play.

Nomadic Furniture , by designers James Hennessey and Victor Papanek, is by not an exhaustive examination of all nomadic furniture but a basic overview of the fundamental types of furniture that people need and how those living the nomadic lifestyle can travel with the furniture they need.

It’s an interesting read now, as it was written in the 70s during the first big oil crunch. The attitude is dated but at the same time completely relevant in terms of the need to conserve energy, reduce consumption of resources, and follow the general model of reduce, reuse, recycle. (If you’ve read Cradle to Cradle, some of this will seem oddly familiar.)

Hennessey and Papanek don’t just show you pictures of furniture you can buy, rather they show you how you can make most furniture on your own. The diagrams are simple and straightforward and are such that they are easily modified and scaled to meet individual needs. Some of the plans are very much in the style of Danish Modern (or IKEA) while others seem a little quaint by contemporary standards. I doubt the dimensions for LPs and cassettes will be useful for many people making storage shelves in this century.

There are a couple of groups of people that I think would greatly benefit from reading this and photocopying some of the plans. The first group are college students who move on a regular basis and for whom saving every penny possible on furniture is worth a little labor. The second group are the true nomadic types, say hardcore burning man participants or people who travel and camp for weeks at a time. There are some creative sleeping and storage solutions in Nomadic Furniture that I will be trying out before our next trip to the playa.

There are only two problems with Nomadic Furniture that I feel the need to point out. The first is that it’s no longer in print, but used copies are easily found on amazon.com and half.com. The second problem is the nearly unreadable typography. I’ve been a huge fan of hand-illustrated and lettered manuals since my first copy of Muir’s How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Complete Idiot, but the strange typeface used in Nomadic Furniture is too much for me. It’s alien enough that the book is an amazingly difficult read, a distraction from the quite clean and readable illustrations.

Find it used, photocopy what you need, then sell/trade/give it to someone else who would find the information useful.

Cite (if you’re interested in my generating BiBTeX refs in future reviews, please speak up):
Hennessey, James and Papanek, Victor. Nomadic Furniture, Pantheon Books, 1973, 0-394-70228-X

Technorati Tags: design, furniture, hennessey, nomadic lifestyle, papanek

Physicist Richard Feynman once said that if all knowledge about physics was about to expire the one sentence he would tell the future is that “Everything is made of atoms”. What one sentence would you tell the future about your own area, whether it’s entrepreneurship, hedge funds, venture capital, or something else?

My current area of expertise is one where the future will look back and laugh at my puny attempts at thought. However, I’m studying design and also thinking quite a bit about things like omniscient surveillance and sustainable living using my experiences growing up in a poor, rural part of the south.

I think I might say, “Seriously consider the fully loaded cost to create and deliver each and every thing you consume or discard before you decide to consume or discard that thing.”

Or I could just be lazy and re-write Kant’s Categorical Imperitive as, “What would the world be like if everyone acted the way you’re acting right now?”

Here’s Jamais answer, but it’d be interesting to hear what a couple other people I know might respond to the same question:

Richard Kadrey

Laura Lemay

(note to self: link to their answers)

Technorati Tags: advice, future, sustainable living

There’s a brief article on Elahi over at worldchanging, I found this on Schneier’s blog.

Technorati Tags: panopticon, spimes

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google

Los Angeles, 2026

Ted got busted because we do graffiti. Losing Ted was a big setback, as Ted was the only guy in our gang who knew how to steal aerosol spray cans. As potent instruments of teenage social networking, aerosol spray cans have “high abuse potential”. So spray cans are among the many things us teenagers can’t buy, like handguns, birth control, alcohol, cigarettes and music with curse words.

I tried hard to buy us another spray can. I’m a street poet, so really, I tried. I walked up to the mall-store register, disguised in my Dad’s business jacket, with cash in hand. They’re cheap, aerosol spray cans. Beautiful colours of paint, just screaming to get sprayed someplace public where everybody has to see what’s on our minds. The store wouldn’t sell me the can. The e-commerce system simply would not allow that transaction. The screen just went gray and stayed gray.

That creepy “differential permissioning” sure saves a lot of trouble for grown-ups. Increasing chunks of the world are just… magically off limits. It’s a weird new regime where every mall and every school and every bus and train and jet is tagged and tracked and ambient and pervasive and ubiquitous and geolocative… Jesus, I love those words… Where was I?

Full story at http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/mg19125691.800

Technorati Tags: design, spimes, sterling, ubicomp

WTF? An expanded polystyrene (EPS) box from Teague? What manner of prank is this? Did someone I know get hired at Teague and put me on their elite client list? (Well, not too elite, it is made of generic EPS and not Styrofoam(TM) brand EPS.)

Um. Ok. A EPS box with a little booklet inside it.

A little booklet showing me their work in hopes I’ll hire them. I’m a software engineer by day and an ID student by night. Why are they sending me this? Did they send this to every student member of IDSA?

The box lets me know that it “can be recycled”. Well, lots of things “can be recycled” if you live in the right part of the world, but how many of us live in a place with easy recycling of block EPS? In the back of the book there’s a note saying I should call a 800 number or go to a website to find out where to recycle it, and that if I can’t recycle it, I can mail it back to Teague and they’ll recycle it:

No joke. Apparently I am either supposed to throw it away, figure out where to recycle it, or pay postage to send it back to Teague.

Looking at epspackaging.org, the nearest place that takes EPS is 45 miles away. I should burn how many gallons of gas to recycle something I didn’t need or want in the first place?

Why not just send me the little booklet in a fancy little cardboard box? Or better still, not send me anything at all until I’ve expressed interest in their services? What’s the fully-loaded cost in terms of natural resources of developing this little piece of advertising and shipping it out to who knows how many people? How many of these boxes will get recycled? How much fuel was burned by the vehicles delivering these boxes?

Perhaps the actual content in the booklet have been better delivered to me via the web. The booklet is smaller than a CD insert so the type is very tiny and the spine won’t lay flat. Even if I wanted to read this it’d be difficult to do so.

Thanks, Teague!

Technorati Tags: advertising, teague, waste

I opened it up and discovered that it contained four, 14″ x 12″ padded plastic envelopes.

After opening the first envelope, I remembered that weeks earlier I’d ordered the service and install manuals for the stove that was already in the house when we moved in.

One of the envelopes contained only a single sheet of paper: a schematic for the stove.

At this point I’m pretty peeved. I’ve got five envelopes made of plastic that I can’t recycle or reuse.

Then I got to noticing that the stack of paper I had was pretty light, possibly lighter than the weight of the packaging itself. I don’t know what the postage charge was, but the thought of paying to have stuff shipped to me that I can’t use or recycle really makes me cranky.

So I broke out the postal scale.

Stove documentation, 6.5oz:

Packaging, 7.5oz:

That’s 7.5 oz of plastic mailers to protect 6.5 oz of paper. I paid twice the postage for unnecessary packaging that will end up in some landfill.

Thanks, Sears!

Technorati Tags: overpackaging, Sears, sustainable design, waste

I said I'd be writing about security next, but I ended up thinking about about the future of data in terms of public policy and societal issues regarding collection and ownership of data. Security is in the queue, but I need to figure out the requirements and context before I think about the implementation.]

The Future of Data

A world filled with RFID tags, smart tags, readers, and spimes reveals a vast amount of easily accessible data not previously available to the individual. A store currently has an idea of its inventory, shrinkage, and daily sales, but I as a shopper wouldn’t know any of that information. A movie theatre would know how many tickets it sold while as a guy watching a movie I can only do a rough count of empty seats and make a guess.

In the near future you or I will be able to know these things, should we choose. We will be able to wander through a public place and automatically collect vast amounts of information in a form easily used by computers instead of tediously taking notes and making spreadsheets.

Think about the world we’re about to inhabit:

• Any object with a more than nominal monetary value has some sort of RFID-like tag used to track the object from creation thru the point of sale and afterwards into its usable lifespan. Not only will the merchant you bought a shirt from know you bought a shirt (and link that information to your customer account), they’ll know every time you wear it past or into their store. You didn’t just buy a shirt, you gave them a fair amount of useful marketing information when you used your credit card to buy the shirt and even more if you ordered it online and had it delivered. If you physically enter a store, the odds are that they’ll also be able to determine who made all the other items on your person and possibly what those items are, then tweak their sales pitch at an individualized level.
• Your PDBD is blasting out data to any device that queries it or broadcasting in cleartext to every device in range. So is everyone else’s, and simple proximity mapping will make it trivial to plot each step by each person through public and even private spaces.
• Readers are everywhere: every business or home has one at the entrance, and most have several inside that operate on different classes of tags using domain specific requirements. The door reader looks for all tags, the inside reader looks for local tags or those that meet a limited set of criteria. Think inventory tracking vs. employee tracking, then imagine every object worth more than a few bucks have its own unique serial number and tracking device.
• Really, readers are everywhere: every commercial delivery vehicle with have some sort of tag reading mechanism to track packages between being picked up and delivered. Reading the contents of those packages will be trivial, and delivery firms will not just have databases of who ships how many packages and to whom, but the contents of those packages will be known.
• Spimes and other types of smart objects (smobjects? smaarbjects?) are collecting data from their surroundings and reporting it back to their owner or the general public. “Data” is any information that can be collected and stored: location, time, temperature, number and type of other tags and spimes seen, data those smart objects have transmitted, etc.
• Proto-spimes are doing this now: A case of expensive wine can know if its been stored at the correct temperatures, a laptop will know if it’s been dropped, a shipment of fragile goods can know if it’s been subjected to improper environments. Take a look at Maxim’s iButtons for an inexpensive, common, off-the-shelf (COTS) example of the technology required to track environments of packages or equipment.

How Your Role Will Change

The technology to collect, store and analyze vast numbers of RFID or other smart tags is about to become very accessible to the masses, very portable and very easy to hide. RFID and other inexpensive tagging mechanisms won’t have the sort of security that a full-on spime has and will be easily readable by just about anyone. (To keep things simple, I’m going to lump publicly readable data from spimes in with data from RFID, bar codes, and other insecure tagging mechanisms and refer to them all as “tags”.)

In a short time — months or a couple of years at most — it will be trivial to build an advanced tag monitoring system that not only scans all nearby tags but call also passively eavesdrop on other scanners as they communicate with tags. Your involvement in the participatory panopticon will go from one of passive participation to active engagement. You no longer have to be just another data point, you can also be a collector, analyzer and interpreter of data and a distributor of information.

What happens today if you wander in with a pad of paper and start writing down a store’s inventory and pricing based on what’s on the shelves with the intent to post it to a web site? You’ll probably get kicked out of the store because most stores have policies about what data you can collect while you’re on their premises. (Try it at your local Wal-Mart if you don’t believe me.)

But what if data collection isn’t obvious? Today, you get kicked out of a store because you are obviously collecting data they don’t want you to collect. What if it just looks like you’re idly browsing through the racks and shelves? Will they kick you out for simply browsing?

In the near future, anyone will be able to wander in to a store with a PDA in their jacket or backpack and a tag scanner up their sleeve and start reading tags on any nearby merchandise. To any human, they will look like someone idly wandering around the store — the typical bored person waiting on their spouse to finish shopping. Perhaps a nearby tag reader would throw exceptions about tag reads that they didn’t request, but would any human get notified in a reasonable amount of time?

Data as Property

Who “owns” the data you just collected with your portable tag scanner and who can do what with it? Is it yours? Does it belong to the store? Facts can be copyrighted, is the state of the store’s inventory a fact that can be somehow put under copyright? Or do you now own a database of facts that you collected in a public space for which you own the copyright?

I can stroll up and down every aisle in a small store at the mall in a matter of minutes, plenty of time to scan not only the inventory on the shelves but the overstock under the shelves and maybe what’s in the back room. If I’m lucky I’ll also get data on other customers in the store and possibly record a few purchase transactions. (One would hope that purchase transactions use some sort of strong cryptography, but I can imagine plenty of systems that use weak or no security in the interests of saving a few pennies.)

When you enter a store and a monitor at the door reads all the tags on your person, what can they do with that data? Do they own it? Do you own it? If I sit in the middle of the food court at the mall with my laptop reading data on all the passersby, what can I do with that data? How about if I monitor the reads being performed by the scanners at the doors of businesses? What if I monitor my competitor’s reader across the way? Next time you’re in a shopping mall, notice at how close together doorways and cash registers are, how many are within line of site of one another, and how many of those businesses are competitors who would benefit greatly from this sort of data.

Hacking the Near Future

So far we’re just talking about COTS technology and most (all?) of these things can or will be done with commercially available tag reading software and hardware. If you want to start writing your own code or hacking your own hardware your data collection and distribution options are greatly increased.

Today you can build an extended range RFID “skimmer” that can poll tags well outside the normal operational range of a few centimeters (See Kirschenbaum and Wool, “How to Build a Low-Cost, Extended-Range RFID Skimmer”.) Yes, it’s bulky and obvious, but you could probably hide one under the counter at a cash register, near a doorway in your business, or in the backseat of your car.

As you’re collecting data from tags in the world around you, you’ll probably pick up a few that are authentication mechanisms of one sort or another. These are useful for replay attacks — when someone copies an authentication token and re-uses it at a later time without the owner’s permission. In the RFID and token world, this could be anything from a toll road account to an employee door badge.

Crimes, Hacking and Pranking

A high powered tag pinger that could query all tags within a meters feet would be a handy thing for me to have if I were of a criminal bent. Instead of guessing which bag to steal from a passerby, which locker to break into at the gym, or which package to steal from a delivery truck I can just wander around scanning things until I find a likely target.

From the other side of the data equation, what’s to stop someone from making bogus tags or making a device that responds as if it were a tag but with bogus data? Someone might notice me physically replacing the bar-code on an item in a store or trying to remove a security tag, but will they notice the RFID emulator in my courier bag? Will they be able to tell that I used it to drown out the tags of any items I have with me as I go through the checkout line or walk past the security scanners at the door?

Theft is a criminal act for which I can be prosecuted, but what if I just send out bogus data with no intent to commit forgery or fraud? Me and a few dozen of my pals looked like poorly dressed people who wandered in to a high end store, looked at a bunch of expensive merchandise and walked out out without buying anything. However, the tag reader at the door logged us as well dressed individuals carrying laptops or expensive cameras. When the store owners sit down to analyze all their demographic data, they’re going to be looking at some very bogus information that will probably lead them to make improper business decisions.

If I suspect my competitor across the way at the mall is snooping on tag activity at my store, what’s to stop me from generating false tag activity? Is it (or should it be) illegal to broadcast fake transactions or other data knowing that my competitors will collect and interpret that data?

Some Questions

These aren’t new issues, but the technology that makes business more efficient makes everything else equally efficient. Hacking, crimes, invasion of privacy, &tc all become more efficient as well. We need to answer some new questions and come up with new answers for old questions:

• What is data?
• What data can be owned and what is in the public domain?
• Who can own data?
• What safeguards does an owner of data have to take to prevent that data from being exposed to the public?
• How is ownership of data determined?
• Who can control data collection?
• Who should control data collection?
• What rights are there to collect data, if those rights even exist?
• What rights are there to prevent collection of data, if those rights even exist?

When I started writing this, I was thinking about securing tags, proto-spimes, and spimes by first determining the requirements created by their environment. I quickly realized that many of the questions I was asking were questions about public policy, laws and social agreements, not questions about technology. The security questions are important but they’re simple engineering problems and will be easily solved once we know the requirements. The questions about how public policy, legal and social agreements will change are much harder to answer than the security questions; our answers will have profound impact on what our world looks like in the coming decades.

Technorati Tags: spimes, RFID, privacy, everyware