Car Metaphors

In spring 2009, students of my Security by Obscurity project were digging into the looks and poetics of online security and the way we are made to believe that we are safe or in danger. Of course Schneier on Security was among our primary readings. The book is a collection of Bruce Schneier’s commentaries from the last decade, most can also be found online. For example the one that provoked a lot of interesting discussions — Praise of Security Theater where Schneier explains the term: Security Theater is “security primarily designed to make you feel more secure.”

Thinking about examples of Security Theater we very soon arrived at the huge field of paper simulation on screen. To look more official, more personal, more trustworthy, more real, designers put digital content on a background that looks like paper. Though the web is so much better than paper.

I now own a piece of software!

I am convinced that this girl is sincere and spontaneous!

I am sure Román Cortés really exists and will read my message!

One of the students, Stefan Krappitz, boiled down this behavior to his project PaperTrust. It is a minimalistic online application: You paste your text in a form and get it back as if it was printed on the paper of your choice, so you can express yourself through paper if the content doesn’t quite do it. Choose fake watermarks for official documents, a napkin to appear creative, or use heavy paper with prepared Adorno footnotes on it! (They may not be a proper reference to your text, but nobody will have doubts in your academic skills.)

“It just feels right to hold the Internet in your hands”

“This, Jen, is the Internet.”

1977:

“A book can be read through the Dynabook […]. It need not be treated as a simulated paper book since this is a new medium with new properties.”
Adele Goldberg, Alan Kay: “Personal Dynamic Media”, via The New Media Reader

2010:

The effect of simulating turning pages is very popular online, especially with web sites that want to appear like magazines.

Typical demo, typical implementation.

The only really good application though is Rafael Rozendal’s colorflip, abstract, useless, primitive, absurd but totally immersive experience.

But now the new contender for most absurd use of page flipping on a screen is the e-book reader on the iPad (see animation above). iPad shows only one page. When you flip, print on the backside of the paper becomes visible — as if you’re about to see a double page next. However, this backside vanishes immediately, leaving you with the impression that you missed a whole page of your e-book.

This is Ted Nelson’s explicit answer to those who simulate paper on screens, copied from Dream Machines (1987, p.28). In the 1980’s Nelson was warning software developers that it won’t end up good if they don’t set users and screens “free from the dimensions and topology of paper”. As we know he was not heard and the last twenty something years we were mostly exploiting our screens to produce content that would look good on paper, or will look like paper on screen.

Nelson’s newest book Geeks Bearing Gifts (2008/2009) is devoted to uncovering the real history of What We Got. It provides an alternative computer history, a sarcastic time-line: from a prehistory rooted in ancient religions to modern computing starting in 1970 with UNIX. And sort of ending (or going in to the totally wrong paper direction) from 1974 on with the PARC User Interface.

In March 1974 the Xerox PARC Alto and its operating system was officially released. In the fall that year, Alto computers were connected to the Scanning Laser Output Terminal and started to print. “[…] it worked perfectly. In fact it worked so well that it quickly ended any fantasy about ‘the paperless office’.” writes M. Mitchell Waldrop in his book The Dream Machine. (2001, p.385, don’t mix it up with Dream Machines by Nelson)

Actually the paperdigm could be traced back to two years earlier, 1972, when Chuck Thacker outlined his preliminary design for the Alto. It included a display about the size and a shape of a standard US letter sheet of paper, which would produce black characters on a bright background.

In Geeks Bearing Gifts Nelson writes PUI where others would say PARC User Interface or GUI. This not very nice sounding abbreviation is repeated many many times, only in negative contexts, becoming a sort of swear-word: P not for Palo Alto Reasearch Center, but P for Paperdigm and damn Paper.

In the short note “The Problem with Metaphors” in Dream Machines, Ted Nelson writes:

“…a bunch of windows on the screen is called a “desktop metaphor”, since it looks to some people like paper on a desk. […]What matters is the best way to detail the virtuality, not finding a relationship to anything that came before. The best new virtualities will have no antecedents.” (p.69)

In 2005 Peter Morville unmasks the Navigaton metaphor* on the web as limiting and counterproductive in his book Ambient Findability. There is “no there there” and thats why there is no sense in drawing a map the web. Web maps are popular as subway map style posters or as interactive dots connected with thin lines in the form of a flash animation. But they do not give more than pretty pictures.

Morvile claims:

“The exploration of new metaphors and the courage to design beyond metaphor are both critical in innovation in web design.” (p.38)

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* Morville mentions a research from 1998: Metaphors We Surf the Web By (PDF) by P. Maglio and T. Matlock. Back then, in hope for more spatially rich navigation experience, they concluded : “Both experienced and unexperienced users talk about the web as if they are moving toward information, rather than as if information is moving toward them. […] The trick lies in discovering the conceptual differences between real space and cyberspace, and then in using those differences to make the boundary apparent.”

Originally the web was supposed to be browsed, but in fact it was “surfed”. Unfortunately not for long. All the fun to follow link after link and immerse in sudden findings was soon delegated to search engine bots. And gradually the WWW was rebuild in a way that is inhuman — pages with no links or with zombie links. So those of us who remember how to surf and are willing to do it can fall into frustration. To find like-minded people and have fun it is recommended to join a surf club*, to go to a web surfing event, or to organize one.

There is no cool sports metaphor for typing keywords and getting search results. So it is prosaically called googling.

Eight years ago, on the peak of the blogging revolution, Henry Jenkins suggested that blogging is as awesome as snowboarding, but this brave comparison didn’t make it into the urban dictionary. (Read my older post on why it wouldn’t work outside of California.)

2009 skateboarding introduced as a metaphor. Skate the Web! — The idea comes from the circle of internet art, but is articulated by representatives of different generations and is therefore filled with different meanings.

Being cynical

Webcrash visitors.

JODI are Net Art veterans. Their recent project — SK8MONKEY — was an event when people could skate on keyboards mounted on wheels. The keyboard were damaged but still functional, connected to computers logged on to Twitter. So you were tweeting by skating. Or in other words, to skate the web is to fill it with content seamlessly and mindlessly.

Being confident

Flayer for Skate the Web show.
Tobias Leingruber, “add-on artist”, author of many great Firefox extensions and curator of the artzilla platform, just published his Skate the web! manifest. An excerpt:

“[…] Open source web browsers like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome allow you to influence the way you access websites. Through additional software, called add-ons or extensions, based on the web browser client, you can completely rearrange the way you experience the internet.

Users no longer have to access information like the architect or designer of the web service wants them to. You want a black background on google.com? Change it to black. You don’t want to see any online advertisements anymore? Install an ad blocking extension to your browser and they are gone. The owners of that website might not like it, but there’s not much they can do about it. They could temporarily disable your code by making it technically more difficult to access their content, but since hackers love those kind of challenges, they’ll always a solution.

[…]

… street skateboarders, just like street artists, see amazing opportunities in public space while others might see nothing but boring concrete. Skaters are on a mission, and they have style. The streets belong to them. When you skate the streets, you use public architecture in ways the creators didn’t expect it to be used, and a lot of times don’t want you to.

[…]

If you enjoy grabbing a skateboard to hit the streets and turn public space upside down, you might as well grab some browser code and SKATE THE WEB.”

Or in other words, to skate the web is to write and install add-ons, to make the web belong to you.

Sounds appealing. To compare skateboards and add-ons is smart, modern and legitimate. Both are tools to misuse the given space. Trouble starts when one gets more general and compares add-on art with street art. As my colleague Mario Doulis noticed during Tobias’ final project presentation**: “Street art much is about boarding public space, about leaving an individual statement as common mark, visible for everybody. It’s there - whether we notice it or not, whether we can decipher it or not, wether we want it or not. Nothing to be prepared or installed.”

It makes me think about the very beautiful Project X. In 1996 British artist Heath Bunting started to write an unusual chalk tag with a URL in public spaces around the world.

The middle of the 1990’s was a time when people were very curios about URLs. They would type irational.org/x when they’d come back to their computers. To find out that they are actively participating in the survey of “graffiti street internet interface” and its their job to fill this location with meaning.

Bunting skating.
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*http://nastynets.com/
http://www.spiritsurfers.net

** “Skate the Web” manifesto is part of Leingruber’s final thesis.

Firefox security icon as it appears on their homepage. (08.04.09)

Firefox security icon on the security page. (08.04.09)

Vatican’s coat of Arms.

Browsing with Firefox now I’m not only feeling safe, but I’m certain that I’m doing the The Right Thing.

Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, published by O’Reilly Media in 2004, gives insight on earning money in the Cloud (though the term is not used), on computer languages and software design. Probably its most known for the first chapter “Why Nerds are unpopular” which explains very good why teenagers (not only nerds) are unhappy.

As the title suggests, it is full of analogies. Indeed, he compares Stalin with Hitler, Cobol with Neanderthal language, Porsche 911 with Roman Pantheon (both are funny), Florence of the 15th century with New York of the 20th. Good hackers with Leonardo and Jane Austen, and bad hackers, who are too lazy to start a startup, with cows who still believe in current running through fence. And of course hacking with painting and architecture.

My attention was attracted by the following metaphor:

“Computer Science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia.” (p.18)

Graham hates the idea to throw mathematitians financed by DARPA, algorithm historians and hackers into the same department, because its intellectually confusing. And most of all because hackers shouldn’t be doing science and research, but “designing beautiful software.” It’s an interesting idea to educate hackers as painters, and probably Graham means that as soon as hackers are independent from computer science they will get rid of research and become artists.

“Perhaps one day “computer science” will, like Yugoslavia, get broken up into its component parts. It might be a good thing. Especially if it meant independence for my native land, hacking.” (p.19)

Let’s hope that when the Federal Republic of Computer Science will break up, Hacking will manage to come out like Slovenia, not like Kosovo or Bosnia.

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The Wikipedia article on computer science names at least six fields, each with numerous disciplines. But what is curious that, despite the overall name, none of them is occupied with computers themselves. The article refers to analogy made once by the noble Dutch scientist Edsger Wybe Dijkstra: “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”

In Top Ten Mistakes of Web Design Jacob Nielsen mentions Opening New Browser Windows. It’s mistake number 9. In my eyes it would have to be number One. Or number Two if Nielsen would have mentioned Zombie Links, links that lead to the same page that is already displayed. They are in fact The Mistake number One. But for some strange reason Nielsen is ignoring them already for 12 years.

To explain what is so evil about New Browser Windows, Nielsen says:

“Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer’s carpet.”

Terrible sales people, who come without invitation and difficult to get rid of; New Browser Windows are terrible in the same way. And now think about Zombie Links, they are like the same Vacuum Cleaner Sales Person appearing every time you open a door or a window or a closet.

When will Nielsen finally pillory them?

I think there is no other person writing about computers and interfaces who would make as many car analogies in their life as Don Norman did. But this is a thing of the past; since automobiles are totally computerized, there is hardly any chance to compare one to another.

Norman’s latest book The Design of Future Things introduces the state of today’s relations in between smart vehicles and their once smart drivers. And though he almost exclusively writes about automobiles, it reads like an outline for HCI in general. After all the automobile is a computers on wheels, and quite in front of other environments awaiting total augmentation. “What is in the automobile today will be in the kitchen, bathroom and living room tomorrow.” (p.157)

In Future Things Norman mentions the H-Metaphor. Here is a paper The H-Metaphor as a Guideline for Vehicle Automation and Interaction, delivered by the German Frank O. Flemisch during his research at NASA, that introduces and explains the new term. The H-metaphor stands for a new approach in user-vehicle interaction and vehicle automation, where the automobile instead of being computer on wheels is seen as a well trained horse, a horse on wheels — intelligent, aware, responsive constructions, that are more safe and more fun to drive.

That’s a very reasonable and promising concept. But a sad one as well. There are two things that are not right.

First: the Upper Case H, that for 50 years belonged to Human in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Human Computer Interaction, is going to be given to the Horse.

Second: Flemisch specifies: “It would be premature to think that we will be able to build something so wonderful and intelligent as a horse.” (p.11)
I think it’s really bitter. While we are still in hope that AI scientists will build a computer that will be as wonderful and intelligent as Human, they confess that they are not able to build a Horse.