Adaptive Path Blog

This week I had the opportunity to talk with Adaptive Path’s old friend Matt Jones, Co-founder and Designer of Dopplr. He’s one of our featured speakers at next month’s MX conference. Some excerpts from our conversation over instant messenger follow, and the whole interview can be found over at my own blog, the Second Verse. Matt and I share a mutual love for some very particular (peculiar?) subjects, so the interview explores some unpredictable territory: the Situationists, Jack Kirby inventions, Grant Morrison, movement in hyperspace, and what the success of the iPhone means to the rest of the mobile device industry. Matt was kind enough to share a ton of information about his perspective and his influences – I hope you enjoy reading the interview.

Also, be sure to remember to register by March 31st for MX – On April 1st, the price goes up. MX is on April 20-22 in San Francisco, the price right now is $1,495. After March 31st, the price jumps to $1,595. (You also get a free iPod Shuffle when you register for MX by March 31st). So register today!

On Social Objects

Ryan Freitas: So, the role of “social objects” in Dopplr…

Matt Jones: Well – let’s dial back the Delorean a little to Jyri’s coinage of “social objects.” He was coming at it from social science, specifically “Actor-Network Theory” where sociologists consider everything to act on everything else – people, environments, tools, and consider these systems to understand how people socialise with each other, mediated by tools, objects, environments etc. So the ’social object’ in Jyri’s thinking is the centre of gravity of some social transaction. And it’s also the trigger… and the transmitter of sociality. The canonical case being a photo in Flickr.

RF: It functions as both artifact and instigator?

MJ: Yep. In dopplr’s case it’s the “trip.”

RF: It’s the thing I’ve created, and placed into the network for others to react to and generate from.

MJ: Yeah – and I guess the interesting thing we’re coming to see is that the ‘placing on the network’ is becoming less of a conscious act, and more the default state.

RF: Auto-artifacting. Like a run in Nike+. Or more accurately, a byproduct of behavior.

MJ: An information wake as it’s been called.

RF: Wake implies one-way…

MJ: Yes. Dopplr is about the future. So we’re a little different; you’re creating a model of the future – a proposal of behaviour if you like. That becomes the social object. Part of the sociality is negotiating and chaging that – optimising it before it happens. Which is a little bit of what my talk is going to be address – the act of making models together.

RF: And finding that “perfect line through the future”? As a collaborative process?

MJ: And how social software is going to ‘disappear’ in the Don Norman sense (i.e. social network functions will become banal as cut and paste).

On “Lost Futures” and Personal Informatics

RF: You’ve mentioned the danger of “lost futures,” based on the success of a given device. One model becomes wildly popular, and other, more interesting ways of looking at the problem get cast aside… or at least ignored when they could be doing the most good.

MJ: Exactly – the gravity well of the iPhone is going to be hard for anyone developing innovative UIs to escape for the next few years. In hardware, you’re subject to the determinism of sourcing components.

RF: Our friends the cognitive anthropologists have warned us about the implications of subscribing to the wrong cognitive artifacts…

MJ: So everyone for the last 2/3 years has been offered the same touchscreen components more or less by a few suppliers. And we all (more or less) have similar dimensions we can work within in a touch UI.

RF: So thinking in hardware becomes even more constrained?

MJ: To an extent. UIs will not be so diverse in the next few years… inside a BigDeviceCo you’re going to find it hard to justify the investment in the out-there stuff (as always). But there’s still innovation a plenty to come, its just that for the next few years it’ll be all 16:9 touchscreens, I guess. And then… hopefully someone will Wii on their parade and breakthrough with something as different as the iPhone was to the existing crop of smartphones. That’s my hope anyway. And I think it might be in the area of physical/gestural interfaces, matched with ambient/visualisation tech to give us more natural ‘Everyware‘.

RF: Anything in that area you’ve been thinking about? Something you’d like to build?

MJ: That would be telling! I think there are already some awesome things being developed by people like Julian Bleeker for instance in this realm of possibility – he’s making reference designs for physical/digital/personal ‘toys’ and devices

RF: I loved the SeeShell concept for Oyster cards that you pointed to a couple days ago.

MJ: Yes! These are the things that interest me greatly – ‘personal informatics’. You mentioned Nike+ which is the poster child for now.

RF: RescueTime is my new favorite.

MJ: Imagine RescueTime extending off the desktop. Scary perhaps…

RF: And now Google Labs is putting out iMap mail behavior visualization.

MJ: I remember BodyMedia from a few years back and people being terrified of it. I wonder if they are more accepting now?

MJ: “We’re all policemen now” as Mr. Morrison said. Self-sousveillance for all.

On Design’s Role in Reducing Misery and Increasing Joy

MJ: Well… Dopplr is definitely a sandbox for some of our philosophies. In that sense we’re designing and building it to prove ourselves right (and wrong) about some of the things we think about social software. And part of that is the way we want this supercontext of shared behaviour and intentions to be accessed and protected.

RF: Protected in what way?

MJ: Well – we try to be very careful about what’s shared, when and to whom and how you can get data in and out – to the supercontext in ways that don’t harm.

RF: You’ve talked about current systems for travel being inherently miserable. It seems that reducing misery is one of your core principles.

MJ: Yes – at the very least. We’d like to increase joy, ideally. But we’ve a long way to go with air travel there…

RF: Increasing joy would be part of prepping humanity for the supercontext, yeah? Building up a karmic surplus? At least, that’s kind of how I’ve approached it.

MJ: It seems prudent.

RF: So on the one hand, as a designers, we’re looking to make awful systems treat people better… but then, as you’ve put it, we as a practice should be looking to inject moments of “irational delight”.

MJ: Yep. “Commodity, firmness and delight” – as Vitruvius said. In that order.

RF: We owe a debt of thanks to Mitch Kapor and his “Software Design Manifesto” for grounding our practice in the principles of Roman Architecture.

MJ: Vitruvius also did a good bit on Siege Engines, but that doesn’t seem to be quoted by so many interaction designers.

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Remember, the whole interview can be found over at my personal blog, Second Verse. Thanks again to Matt for a lively and informative discussion!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Conversations, Design Leaders, Experience Design, Friends of Adaptive Path, Mobile, People You Should Know, Upcoming Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.