Data as
seductive
material
Umeå, Sweden
63º 50’ N 20º 25’E
Matt Jones
27.03.09
DOPPLR

Hello!
DOPPLR
Hello there. I’m Matt Jones, and I’m a designer who amongst
other things used to live and work in Helsinki for Nokia working
on interface and interaction design. Now I live in London,
working on a service called Dopplr.

This is a tiny version of me! The availbot is a small likeness of me
that plugs into the USB port of a computer, and when I’m online
or chatting to you, it would stand to attention. When I’m not it
would fall slack to the table. This gives you some idea of the
attention I’m giving our conversation, in the physical space
you’re in.

DOPPLR
DOPPLR
First of all, a little context about what I’m going to talk about - I’m
a cofounder and lead designer on Dopplr, which is a social tool
for optimising travel.

“Serendipity is
looking in a haystack
for a needle and
discovering a
farmer's daughter.”
Julius Comroe Jr.
DOPPLR
Our starting point was: could we create a system that increased
the happy little coincidences, or serendipty in your life as your
travel through the world? This is my favourite definition of
Serendipity!

DOPPLR
Dopplr looks a bit like this.

DOPPLR
Dopplr looks a bit like this.

DOPPLR
Raumzeitgeist 2007
Where next?
DOPPLR
But what I want to talk about today is the possibility of working
with data as a material in a ‘designerly’ way. This is an image we
generated after about 9 months of Dopplr. It looks like a NASA
image of Earth from space - it’s a purely user-generated image
where people reported they were travelling to. Which blew us
away.

Warning...
DOPPLR
Now, I have to warn you that this is very much my early thinking
about this as a practitioner rather than a theorist or academic.
But as Philip Tabor once said - internet is a place for half-formed
thoughts. Perhaps this room, and afterwards the discussions
we’ll have online can help develop it.

“Sculpting
with Data”
Boris Anthony
Picture by Matt Biddulph
DOPPLR
My co-designer and colleague Boris Anthony often says that the
ongoing act of designing Dopplr is like ‘sculpting with data’ - as
opposed to designing wireframes or screens in isolation. Usually
we need to work very closely with Matt Biddulph and Tom Insam
- who code Dopplr, to discuss and understand what the data we
are dealing with will be like, and the risks and opportunities it
presents as a material. That was the prompt for this talk, so
thanks Boris!

Making the
invisible,visible
DOPPLR
Also, increasingly we are able to see previously invisible
behaviours from ‘the real world’ and apply social tools to them.
“Anything essential is invisible to the eye” - is the quote from The
Little Prince that perhaps technology is reconfiguring.
This is “Nuage Vert” - a project in Helsinki (where half of Dopplr
are based) wear a laser picks out the pollution coming from a
power station. Eerie, beautiful and perhaps, useful to the city...

Data
Everyware
DOPPLR
So - a few pegs to hang this half-formed thought from. The first -
we are moving to a world where everything will be throwing off
digital data - ‘data shadows’ which http://www.wordspy.com/
words/datashadow.asp tells me was first coined in 1967 by Alan
Westin, but was used to great effect in Adam Greenfield’s 2006
book ‘Everyware’

By year end 2012,
physical sensors will
create 20 percent of
non-video internet traffic.
Gartner Top 10 Predictions for 2009
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=876512
DOPPLR
What ever you think of analysts like Gartner, the mainstream
press and business world pay attention to them. So it’s worth
noting when they come out with a statement like this. What
interests me about how it’s formulated is that instead of the oft-
quoted number of microprocessors that will surround us in a
ubicomp near-future: this is framed in terms of internet traffic,
specifically media traffic. It speaks to the size of the flow rather
than the scope of the coverage.

Physical generation of
Digital assets
DOPPLR
This flow is increasingly coming from the things we own and use

Instrumented cities
DOPPLR
and the environments we inhabit

‘quantised self’ -kk
DOPPLR
Kevin Kelly has started tracking the trend toward ‘personal
informatics’ on his blog “The Quantified Self”, and if there’s
anyone who can spot a trend...

Photo by edans, Flickr Creative Commons
DOPPLR
But of course, the most ubiquitous sensor that you carry with
you all the time is your phone. They’re increasingly carrying
sensors, GPS units and the like - but crucially they get it onto the
network.

Personal Sensors
Direct reporting Bureaucratic sources
Attention Data
Sensors in your
environment
Objects that report
to the network
This is a framework that my friend Tom Coates formulated for
looking at the types of personal ‘data shadow’ we are generating
- and now sharing with each other.

Personal Sensors
ING
HAR
S
Direct reporting Burea c tic s urc s
Attention Data
Sensors in your
environment
Objects that report
to the network
This is a framework that my friend Tom Coates formulated for
looking at the types of personal ‘data shadow’ we are generating
- and now sharing with each other.

And here’s one of Tom’s datashadows, his last.fm music listening
expressed as a visualisation. You can see behaviour exposed
here over time. It’s fascinating to compare this stuff with a similar
visualisation from a friend of mine. He listens to things in full
albums, played in order, and listens intently to one band for a few
weeks at a time.

Martin Hilpoltsteiner
http://www.recreating-movement.com
via http://www.kottke.org/08/02/time-merge-media
DOPPLR
And behaviour over time is one of the things that we can have
new views or new models of through our technology. More on
that later.

Visualisation
Everyware
DOPPLR
Another peg - the rise and rise of data visualisation.

DOPPLR
This is work by Stamen Design, one of the leading design
studios in data visualisation (who I’m also occasionally an advisor
to, to be clear!) It’s something called ‘Trulia Hindsight’, for a real-
estate website, showing real-estate transactions for the whole of
the 20thC across the USA. It’s an incredible example of how an
interactive visualisation can illustrate historic trends and events.
http://hindsight.trulia.com

Instrumented world
DOPPLR
Some more work by Stamen, this time a Hurricane Tracker for
MSNBC, dealing with live meteorological data rather than historic
data.

Instrumented world
DOPPLR
The long zoom that’s possible within this visualisation - from the
entire atlantic down the level of individual places of habitation is
powerful. http://stamen.com/msnbc_hurricane_maps

Visualisation Culture
DOPPLR
Information Visualisation is becoming a ‘culture’ or an aesthetic
of it’s own. Something that people record, critique and share/
create a literacy in.

Everyone wants a muscle-car
DOPPLR
This is Google’s “Chrome Experiments”: a site where many
prominent data artists and visualisation experts were asked to
create pieces that were complex enough to show off the
performance of their new browser “Chrome”. They’re shiny
pumped-up muscle cars of visualisation!

DOPPLR
This is a piece for that by two friends of mine, Sascha Pohflepp
and Karsten Schmidt, called Social Collider. It takes the aesthetic
of high-energy physics: particle collisions, cloud chambers etc
and superimposes that on interconnected social networks in
Twitter. It’s beguiling and strains the performance of your browser
as per the brief to show something in a much more seductive
way that the simple social matrix beneath. http://
www.socialcollider.net

DOPPLR
And I guess this is where we are - the beginnings of a medium in
its own right, that we are developing a literacy in, and a critique
of. A milestone in any medium is the publishing of a glossy
coffee table art book about it, after all...

Seduction
Everyware
DOPPLR
Final peg - seduction.

“The process of deliberately enticing
a person to engage in some sort of
behavior, frequently sexual in nature.
The word seduction stems from
Indo-European roots and means
literally \"to lead astray.\"
As a result, the term may have a
positive or negative connotation.”
DOPPLR
No presentation is complete without the lazy cut-and-paste of a
wikipedia definition!

DOPPLR
And if I was a lot cleverer I’d bring some of that fancy French
philosophy stuff in here, but I’ll leave that to my clever friends
hopefully.

DOPPLR
But we are reminded by many that there are dangers in making
our representations more seductive than the truth.

DOPPLR
To make points that aren’t there, or to dramatise the story in the
data.

DOPPLR
To justify a point of view or disguise a dishonesty

Number
of Bad Graphs
Duration of
Financial Crisis
DOPPLR
And that’s certainly true at the moment.

DOPPLR
But, should we eschew techniques of seduction, the
development of an aesthetic?

Isn’t there something thrilling going on. If there is transparency
available, structure or process examinable - can you be
beguiled? Is it wrong to enjoy being beguiled by data? How can
we convey truth in a medium alongside what Liz Goodman of
Berkeley School of Information has called “Charismatic images”

Data as
Seductive
Material
DOPPLR
Can we explore Data as a seductive material in the same way as
stone, wood, metal can be used for beauty as well as structure
and commodity?
Again, half-formed thoughts follow (perhaps if they are based on
the previous half-formed thesis they’re quarter-formed thoughts!)
What happens if we look at data through lenses comprised of
the sorts of properties we find in precious, seductive physical
materials?

Data as
Seductive
Material
Grain &
Authenticity
DOPPLR
Firstly... Grain and authenticity...

DOPPLR

DOPPLR

What is the grain of your data?
DOPPLR
This is one of the question that we ask in the design process,
and something we absolutely have to do as a complete team - in
terms of design, technology and often business processes.

Stamen Design
http://www.stamen.com
“Show everything”
DOPPLR
Back to the team at Stamen...
One of the most intriguing stances they take is quite the
opposite of what we’re usually taught in design school - to edit,
take away, minimise, simplify.
They often ask themselves at the beginning of a design process:
“What would happen if we tried to show everything?”

DOPPLR
This is a piece by Shawn Allen, also at Stamen - but this is for
HIM - he created this as a tool to find good and bad data in the
cabspotting visualisation he worked on. This is a tool to find the
grain of the data. To refine it.

“House of Cards” by Radiohead
Aaron Koblin, James Frost et al.

What is the grain of your data?
DOPPLR

Data as
Seductive
Material
Behaviour &
Charisma
DOPPLR
Secondly... Behaviour and ‘charisma’

DOPPLR
It seems like there’s something in the air at the moment about
reconsidering what we know about influence and persuasion -
that we don’t do everything for rational reasons. Something I
guess we’ve known individually for millennia, but economics and
politics have consider us as rational animals for a few hundred
years...

DOPPLR
I mentioned the way that Liz Goodman referred to images used
in persuasion

DOPPLR

DOPPLR
Alongside the power of the image is the power of the feedback
loop in persuasion...

Playfulness!
“Game mechanics are rule
based systems / simulations
that facilitate and encourage
a user to explore and learn
the properties of their
possibility space through the
use of feedback
mechanisms.”
Raph Koster
DOPPLR

DOPPLR
For instance the default setting of the Toyota Prius dashboard
showing MPG, not MPH encouraging the ‘game’s win state’ to
be lowering the MPG...

FTW!
DOPPLR
For instance the default setting of the Toyota Prius dashboard
showing MPG, not MPH encouraging the ‘game’s win state’ to
be lowering the MPG...

DOPPLR
A small example from Dopplr...

DOPPLR
Here’s my 2008. Must try harder... Though it seems to be
trending down...

DOPPLR
This is the ‘nudge’

Data as
Seductive
Material
Age &
Patina
DOPPLR
Lastly, age and patina.

DOPPLR
I’m very interested in examples of objects or systems that
declare their lifespan, their projection into the future, like this
simple design touch in Howies Hand-Me-Down jacket of a name
tag that encompasses generations.
It persuades you the object is precious and will survive to be
handed over to a successor.
How might we embed that into an interactive, digital, ephemeral
thing? What would we want to suggest about the longevity or
the impermanence of a data set. Perhaps impermanence of
private information - to reassure individuals - or the longevity of
public data to reassure groups.

DOPPLR
Here’s Trulia Hindsight from Stamen again. This works because
of the time span within the data. There are new things you can
do once you have enough data of a certain vintage.

2008 Personal annual report for Barack Obama
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
Manchester Boston Washington Kabul Berlin Denver New York Chicago
January 05 February 04 June 04 July 20 July 24 August 28 October 16 November 04
You took 234 trips in 2008, which In 2008, you spent
added up to 337,729 km or 92% of the
distance to the moon.
133 233
In 2008, you mostly coincided with:
You have 4 travellers in your network. They travelled a
total of 657,789 km in 2008, and everyone on Dopplr
Joe travelled a total of 1331.4 million km or 8.9 AU in 2008:
the approximate distance to Saturn from the Earth as
including Des Moines and Washington
of January 2009.
John
Your personal velocity for 2008 was 38.10
including Peterborough and Washington
Your carbon for 2008
km/h, which is about the same as a You spent the most time in Chicago. Lauren
six-lined race runner lizard.
Kurtz has a tip: “The Publican. Amazing beer
Michelle
list and melt in your mouth food. In the Fulton
The 5 most popular cities in your network are
including Washington and Detroit
Market area.”
Washington, Columbus, Cincinnati, Denver and Miami.
Sarah
in Columbus
The furthest distance you travelled was to Kabul
(11,211 km from Chicago), which is the 829th most
42,299 kg CO2 (4.2 Hummers)
popular city on Dopplr. The shortest distance you
Based on figures from Fueleconomy.gov, 1 x Hummer
travelled was to Oregon (6 km from Toledo).
H3 4WD truck produces nearly 10 metric tonnes of
CO2 a year. The visualisation above uses this figure to
illustrate your carbon from Dopplr as calculated by our
friends at http://amee.cc and is an approximation only.
The city images above sourced from Flickr and are used under a Creative Commons Attr bution Licence: Sunset on the Charles by Pear Biter, Pennsylvania Ave - Old Post Office to the Capitol at Night by wyntuition, we'll meet again by chaosinjune, Colorado State
Additional imagery by Flickr users: Gongus, Matthias Winkelmann, Wendy Piersall, Spotbott and Beard Papa
DOPPLR
For instance, we were able to create a personal annual report for
all of our users on Dopplr once we had our first full calendar year
of their data to reflect back to them in what was hopefully an
interesting way.
Can we think of data as a material having different poroperties as
it ‘ages’ and accumulates, and design accordingly?

DOPPLR
So... alongside considering the timespan or age of our data, we
can think about the ‘patina’ of data that it gathers over that time.
What do I mean by “patina”?
Whether it’s dog-eared pages of books

DOPPLR
Our tools... (this is bruce sterling’s keyboard)

DOPPLR
Or paths in our public spaces... use is revealed through wear-
and-tear. The patina.

DOPPLR
Layering of new information on information, metadata - is of
course is nothing new.

DOPPLR
This is a map from the collection of the National Maritime
Museum, where successive explorers annotated new
opportunities, theories and obstacles on the same map over
several expeditions over the course of several years.

DOPPLR
Media doesn’t need to interpret use as damage.
Our content itself gets smarter as it aggregates our thoughts
about it.
This is the Archimedes Palimpsest. I think the palimpsest as a
model for social tools is a powerful one.
Of course they originated from the scarcity of media, something
we don’t exactly suffer. But thinking about the medium as
something that accretes messages in the way they did helps me.
I also just like saying it. Palimpsest!

DOPPLR
Raumzeitgeist 2007
Where next?
DOPPLR
We can build up palimpsests of data, and we can represent
patina of use in interesting and beautiful ways.

DOPPLR
When we expose these previously invisible patterns in social
software - what feedbacks happen?

Visualisation
Data
Everyware Everyware
Data as
Seduction Seductive
Everyware Material
DOPPLR
So this is I guess the half-formed conclusion of my half-formed
thoughts...

Data as
Precious
Material?
DOPPLR
This is a strange concept, perhaps. It maybe contradictory in the
face the abundance of data we experience.
But I guess our data is only made precious by our interactions
with it? The meaning we make with it, both as designers, and as
users of what others have designed.

Einar Sneve Martinussen, Timo Arnall and Jørn Knutsen
DOPPLR
And as designers it’s imperative that we learn to investigate data
as a material in a critical and designerly way - as we would with
physical materials.

DOPPLR
With the mastery and assistance of experts and with intuitions
one can only get from working closely with it.

Making the
invisible, tangible + precious
DOPPLR
So that we can bring both sense and sensuality to a new world
of pervasive data.

DOPPLR
Thanks for your attention.

Thanks!
mj@dopplr.com
http://www.dopplr.com
http://www.magicalnihilism.com
DOPPLR
DOPPLR
DOPPLR
Thanks for your attention.
Where next?
Where next?
Where next?