Art [X]Smooth Images

The e itud Plen Design and Engineering in the era of Ubiquitous Computing Rich Gold © Rich Gold 1993 – 2002 Silicon Valley, California [email protected] www.richgold.org draft version 0.9 Dedicated to Marina LaPalma and Henry Goldstein The Present Press Note: You must change the following preferences in Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 to view this book correctly: Under Edit (or under Right Arrow above slide bar) go to Preferences. In Preferences Check all of the following: [x]Smooth Text [x]Smooth Line Art [x]Smooth Images Do not use Adobe eBook Reader to view this book. It does not allow these settings. The Plenitude Page 1 12/10/2002 TABLE OF CONTENTS: I. INTRODUCTION II. THE 4 CREATIVE HATS III. MY LIFE IN THE PLENITUDE (A) IV. SMART HOUSE? V. MY LIFE IN THE PLENITUDE (B) VI. SEVEN PATTERNS OF INNOVATION VII. MY LIFE IN THE PLENITUDE (C) VIII. THE MUSEUM AS A BOOK IX. DESIRE IN CONTEXT X. MY LIFE IN THE PLENITUDE (D) XI. THE PLENITUDE I think this is a good place to note that throughout this book I make heavy use of a font I got off the web called MOM’S TYPEWRITER. Frankly, I’ve got a font Jones and spend way too much time routing about the web looking for new fonts, not unlike how driftwood artists scour the shores looking for new bleached branches. Christoph Mueller designed MOM’S TYPEWRITER by scanning in the output of his mother’s old machine. One of its charms is that it has neither a zero nor a one. Just like real old typewriters you are supposed to use an upper case “O” and a lower case “L” to complete the numerics. Fine, except that it makes automatic page numbering impossible. Whenever I use MOM’S TYPEWRITER it reminds me that every technology has a proclivity. Chapters III, V, VII and X together form the autobiography of my life and are included as proof of what I say elsewhere in the book about the Plenitude. This autobiography is, as many readers have noted, too plenitudinous itself. It can certainly be skimmed, skipped, or flipped through. What the autobiography proves, BTW, is that the Plenitude exists because it is joyful to make. The Plenitude Page 2 12/10/2002 N UCTIO TROD I. IN Perhaps this is also a good place to point out that all the slides in this book, except the ones in the chapter called Smart House?, were produced directly in PowerPoint. For me PowerPoint is more than a presentation tool, it is a thinking tool. I push the various drawing and text objects around in the white rectangle based on thoughts, and the resulting arrangements create yet newer thoughts. In most cases I design the slides first, the notes, the words underneath the slides, for instance these words, later. The images in Smart House? were drawn using an amazing program called Painter which does a pretty good job of replicating natural media. By using my pressure sensitive Wacom tablet I can draw in water color, ink, pastels, oil, chalk, whatever. Its kind of like the visual equivalent of an electronic organ with multiple stops. Oh yes, it doesn’t smear. I use also use the Wacom to draw my cartoons directly in PowerPoint. I color the figures using a separate layer and not with “fill”. My father, who is a printer, once pulled me aside to tell me that my registration was off. “Dad,” I had to say, “it takes me hours to achieve that effect.” I started out in life trying to get as far away from the printing business as I could. I was half way through my stint at Xerox before I realized how thick the ink in my blood actually was. The Plenitude Page 3 12/10/2002 During the last ten years I have found myself giving hundreds talks. While most audiences think of them, I suspect, as slightly odd business presentations, I think of them as toned down performance art works. I have given them to sailors in the Coast Guard, to scientists at IBM, to artists at the Adelaide Arts Festival, to designers at the Aspen Design Conference, to civic leaders in Sheffield England, to the PTA in Palo Alto, to the engineers at the MITRE think-tank, to academics at MIT, to CEOs at The World Economic Forum. I’ve certainly racked up the frequent flyer miles. In these talks I stand before a large screen and narrate the slide which is projected on to it. A button is pressed, the image changes, and I narrate the next slide. And so on. Sometimes I spend several minutes talking about a slide, more often, I give each about thirty seconds or so. That’s a lot of slides for an hour long talk. This form of literature is called (by me, at least) “verbally augmented epigraphic writing” and is practiced by generals in front of colorful war maps, coaches in front of chalk-diagrammed black boards, designers with illustrated flipcharts and art historians with 35mm slides of old masters. In the last several years my talks have centered on a single theme: the Plenitude. The Plenitude Page 4 12/10/2002 How many things are there in an average room, say a kitchen, say my kitchen? I can easily count a thousand, but the actual answer is fractal. Every appliance, every tool, even every food (certainly if you count pesticide residue) is compound and is composed of tens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of other things. And every day new shopping bags arrive filled with yet more things. The bags were filled at malls and supermarkets, themselves filled with millions of things. It’s a lot of stuff. Some of the stuff is called media and its filled with transient, slightly more ethereal stuff. Some large part of the stuff in the media are words and images designed to get us to purchase the non-mediated stuff (and services to manage the stuff.) While it is true that each piece of stuff satisfies some desire, it is also true that each piece of stuff creates the need for even more stuff. Cereal demands a spoon; a TV demands a remote. The stuff co-evolved and is intertwined and interdependent. Recently some of the stuff has begun to talk to other stuff directly. The kitchen utensils, like an early Disney movie, have begun to chat and dance behind our backs. And all the while, more bags of stuff keep coming in the door. For a long time I called our culture The Junk Tribe, but that’s both too pejorative and not scary enough. Rather, for reasons I will describe, I have come to call this dense, knotted ecology of humanly-created stuff the Plenitude. This book is about it. The Plenitude Page 5 12/10/2002 9O OO 5O 6O 7O 8O My Graphical Vitae Widget I have spent my life making more stuff for the Plenitude. While I will describe my lucky life more fully later in the book, this is a good time to note that it has been a diverse life. It has encompassed making art stuff, game stuff, toy stuff, office equipment stuff, science stuff and museum exhibit stuff. I have also written novels and made lots of electronic music (the later technically interesting, musically suspect.) That is to say, that while like most people in the Western industrialized world I live deep inside the Plenitude, I also helped to make it. Even more unusually, I have done so in the often oppositional contexts of art, science, design and engineering. This book on stuff is not the book of an outsider. If there is a thread that runs through creations of this lifetime, it is that most of the stuff I have made is an exploration of new things to do with that interesting abstraction we call “computing”. My life has been about taking these little chips of silicon and putting them in social situations where they had never been before. While there are various theories as to how the Plenitude started, we know it mostly grows because it creates desire for more of itself. But it also grows because it is extraordinarily pleasurable to create. This book looks at both sides: creation and consumption. For me there is great pleasure and desire in both. The Plenitude Page 6 12/10/2002 INTRODUCTION 2OO2 THE 4 CREATIVE HATS l994 MY LIFE IN THE PLENITUDE l999 SMART HOUSE? l993 SEVEN PATTERNS OF INNOVATION l994 THE MUSEUM AS A BOOK 2OOl DESIRE IN CONTEXT 2OO2 THE PLENITUDE l999 This book is taken from the talks I have given. While not transcriptions, I have attempted to capture something of their sound, look and feel. On the other hand, something odd happens when genres jump media. In this particular case it is clear that narrating a slide from the stage is different than captioning an image on a page. I will attempt to keep in mind that the reader is likely alone in an armchair, or in bed, or on a train, and not in an auditorium on an uncomfortable metal seat part of a group listening to my explanations. Social laughter and groaning are different than private laughter and groaning. You are just finishing the Introduction. Hats concerns itself with art, science, design and engineering, the four professions which collectively have created about 95% of the Plenitude. My Life traces, well, my own life through these four professions and examines what it is like to help construct the Plenitude.

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