Designing for
Spacetime
Building in no-time...
IxDA08 Savannah, Georgia
N 32° 5' 0'' W 81° 5' 59''
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11.15 am
Matt Jones
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Hello. I’m Matt Jones, and I’d like to talk to you...
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... here, for 45mins or so, about Spacetime.
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Spacetime?
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Spacetime? Eh? Let me explain a little...
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When Dan Saffer asked me to speak, I proposed a talk
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that was balanced between the speculative and the
practical
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But, during the preparation, I suppose a little bit of my
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natural inclination towards the speculative emerged
steadily. And here we are...
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First of all, a little context - I’m a cofounder and lead
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designer on Dopplr, which is a social tool for optimising
travel.
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Travel was, after all, something that was special, exciting
We started it about a year ago, and the idea came a little
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before that when we were all travelling a lot, and
lamenting that it wasn’t the glamourous and stimulating
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experience it maybe used to be.
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Now, for most of us, it’s something quite di!erent.
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Could we do anything to make it a little better? We
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thought so.
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22
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We wanted to engineer a little bit of this - cybernetic
This growth in personal informatics I believe (with many others, as detailed in those books) will lead
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to many downsides - seen and unforeseen - but also a large upside, in the increase of serendipity
serendipity. If you were at Molly’s talk yesterday you
in the world... (poster from ICA exhibition 1968)
would have heard a lot about Cybernetics... But
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serendipity?
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“Serendipity is
looking in a haystack
for a needle and
discovering a
farmer's daughter.”
Julius Comroe Jr.
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This is my favourite definition! Could we create a system
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that increased the happy little coincidences in your life
as your travel through the world.
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Dopplr is really trying to use the sharing of information
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is a catalyst,
as a catalyst to that end.
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ur focus Where next? use information you share as a catalyst to increase serend
as letting you

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So, let’s take a very quick look at it for those who haven’t
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come across it yet
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Here’s the main view I see once I’m logged in - it’s a very
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simple report of my upcoming trips
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Each trip is the central ‘social object’ of Dopplr... Here’s my trip page for
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IxDA08 - aggregated here are nice things like the flickr pictures i’ve taken this
trip, notes by me and friends of mine and stats about travel here. But the main
thing to look at is the ‘Coincidences’ block - showing me the other people I
share information with on Dopplr who are going to be here. Not such a suprise
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to me right now, but leading up to the conference it was nice to see names
gather there...
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Here’s another view - the city page for Savannah,
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Georgia. Here you can see trips people have coming up
to Savannah and see if there are any tips for you while
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you stay here. None yet - but I plan to add some...
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And finally in the whistlestop tour - a very important
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view - your journal of activity on Dopplr, showing the
flows of information from you and your connections on
Dopplr.next? be coming back to this.
Where We’ll
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We’ve been ‘live’ a little over 9 months now - and the activity on the service
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has already blown me away. At the beginning of the year we generated our
version of Google’s Zeitgeist feature, but instead of search terms we used trips
- and the coverage of the planet our users have made in that time is amazing.
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In a play on Zeitgeist - ‘the spirit of the times’, we called
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it the “Raumzeitgeist” - or Spacetime Spirit...
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But, really...
Spacetime?
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DOPPLR and the past of an individual
This diagram shows the ‘lightcone’ of the future
is about the future, which you can’t
Where we’re called Dopplr - alluding to the doppler effect as
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‘observer’ - Dopplr is about what happens if you have this view - and take it
social. The ability to remodel and optimise your travel plans based on those of
automate (yet)
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others. That’s why
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Where
things approach and recede from you.
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As Sarah Connor once said... “no future but that we
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make”
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I love this - I took it some years back at a museum in Sydney, Australia. For me it
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sums up what we really do with computers most often... Make models of things so
we can understand them better and moreover, spin them round, poke and prod
them until we find some optimal state.
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Dopplr is for...
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...finding the perfect line through the world.
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What a grandiose statement! But - there’s something in
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it I think...
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Martin Hilpoltsteiner | http://www.recreating-movement.com
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via http://www.kottke.org/08/02/time-merge-media
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If we can make models of our future paths through space
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and time, and share them, we can see them in new ways
optimise them.
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This is a few panels from Grant Morrison’s “The
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Invisibles” which I always have in the back of my mind
when working on Dopplr.
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If we can perceive our past and our future in new ways
howis about change our interactions? you can’t
would that the future, which
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automate (yet)
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Where
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“The hypersurface
of the present”
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What a great sentence!
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There’s another strand of thinking about spacetime I’d
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like to take for the rest of the session... And, again, it’s
about changes in perception.
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Clockwork Contextual
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Predictable Interwoven
.0!
Discrete Fuzzy
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Until about 100 years ago, Sir Isaac Newton had given us a firm grip on the universe
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and how it worked. It was a majestic mechanism - clockwork, predictable, discrete
and very neat! Albert came along and proposed something very different. His was a
much more messy, subjective universe that we were tangled up in. It’s highly
contextual, everything is deeply interwingled and fuzzy. In many ways, Universe 2.0!
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Sorry.
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Contextual
Interwoven
Fuzzy
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And those themes are the ones I see changing
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interaction design - at least my practice of it, especially
now I’m doing Dopplr. I’d like to use each as ‘pegs’ from
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which to hang some examples.
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Contextual
Interwoven
Fuzzy
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So first peg - Contextual
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Sketch by
Matt Ward of
Goldsmiths College
I really like this sketch of Matt Ward’s showing the stark
difference between the contexts of consumption and
production of most technologically-mediated
experiences.

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DOPPLR Photo by David Erwin
And, likewise, I love this photo by David Erwin of myself,
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Michelle Chang and Fabio Sergio in Berlin. Devices,
people and the city give a rich fabric of context for
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interaction designers to cut their cloth in.
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So, if you’ll forgive me a little sidetrack on context and
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mobile- it mystifies me a bit when I see things like
Edward Tufte’s speculative iPhone redesign. It seems to
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ignore the context entirely - fetishising dense displays of
information...
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DOPPLR Photo by David Erwin
That would probably get one of us killed if we’d had it in
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Berlin...
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What I believe but can’t prove (and the trend in the
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market seems to be working against me)
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sociality
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sociality
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The tension between the context that mobile
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experiences play out in...
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consumption
And mobile devices’ increasing tendency to devour our
attention... (Don’t get me wrong - I think the iPhone is a
breakthrough device, but it’s a jealous beauty when it
comes to our attention, to be sure)

Must try harder
Is something that isn’t being resolved very successfully
currently...

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Things like this flipping gesture to silence a call might be
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a possible future path. Cheesy and crappy though this
video is - the idea that I can maintain a conversation and
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Where meaningfully in the world with others is
enormously appealing I think.
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dopplrbot / mobile
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</end sidetrack> We’re trying to pick at these patterns
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with streams of information that arrive in the right
context at the right time, for instance our mobile version
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of Dopplr or...
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dopplrbot / mobile
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Our forthcoming IM alerts...
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Contextual
Interwoven + distributed
Fuzzy
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Second peg(s) - I’m cheating a little here...
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Understanding the
very small has
big implications
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As I thought of the changes in our perception Einstein
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created, I couldn’t help but think of these guys -
Heisenberg and Bohr, at the beginnings of Quantum
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Mechanics. And how our understanding of the very
smallest components of physical reality have had very
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big implications on our perception.

“There’s plenty of
room at the bottom”
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I think the same goes for the web, and this change in
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perception has led to very exciting thinking amongst
those who are experimenting in ‘the room at the bottom’
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as Feynman had it.
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www.plasticbag.org/files/native/
Tom Coates
Native to
a Web of
Data
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Tom Coates of Yahoo’s Brickhouse advance products
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division sums up a lot of this thinking in his presentation
‘Native to a web of data’. He explains how thinking of a
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web of data sources rather than pages or sites changes
the interactions we design and the products or services
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we build.

Matt Webb / Movement / Snap
http://schulzeandwebb.com/2008/movement/
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Matt Webb of Schulze&Webb just in the last week
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published a tour-de-force in his talk about “movement”
as the new paradigm to shape the web going forward.
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http://schulzeandwebb.com/2008/movement/
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He posits we are moving from a web of ‘places’ - pages
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and sites through a phase of the web as a kit of tools -
to something more like a web of organisms or engines
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connected and fuelling each other. I think (and hope)
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Where right! Interwoven.

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In the last year there’s been talk of the web as a ‘coral
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reef’ that is both architecture and organism. I like that
metaphor, and we often think of Dopplr as a very tiny
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part of the reef that tries to adapt to an ecological niche
there...
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Dopplr is designed for a web of data and movement
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a bunch of small pieces that we show in the right context at the
right time, add some value to, and pipe to wherever you find it the
most valuable next. That’s our role as an organism on the reef.
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Designing a distributed, interwoven identity
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We don’t want to be a beautiful website, we want to be a beautiful part of
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the web. While the utopian side of us wants to make a web service you
never have to visit the website of (because it’s delivering all of it’s value
in a distributed interwoven and contextual way) we’re still trying to build
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a business and a brand - which means being recognised and enjoyed...
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What a crawler! It’s a great point though...
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© 200
Our identity is in tiny things like our logo, that changes
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colour as your trips change.
© 2007 Dop
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I think tiny, dynamic behaviours like that in an identity
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become a strong DNA that can survive being fragmented
and distributed across the internet and delivery
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platforms.
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We often use a term we learnt from someone in the Hotel industry -
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“Delighters” e.g. the rubber ducky that he might put in a guest’s room on
the 3rd day of their stay or the Beach Ball he might put on their bed if it
was forecast to sunny. We’re always trying to create “Delighters” that can
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punctuate the experience of using Dopplr with joy.
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Contextual
Interwoven
Fuzzy
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The final of the three pegs - fuzziness
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As we know, Humans are naturals at fuzzy. Software,
not-so-much. Making things that are perfectly
unambiguous to humans unambiguous to computers is
the majority of our work I think. E.g. getting the right
place name.

Dopplr guesses based on a number of factors including
past trips, and overall activity patterns across the
service.

But if we didn’t get it right, we ask for your help.

And as you might not be sure, we try and help in return.

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We’re trying to add fuzziness instead of take it away
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elsewhere. Like showing you that someone you might
want to get in touch with is nearby to your destination
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And we want to add this helpful fuzziness in both time
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and space. Spacetime! Yay!
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Play to find the perfect line
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We want to take this nondiscrete fuzzy approach further - to really turn this into a
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tool for finding the perfect line. And hopefully keep it delightful while doing so.
Creating visualisations of your system that enourage this will be part of it. This is
a diagram from Will Wright of ‘local maxima’ in a continuous landscape of fun...
This was a design document, not a UI element, AFAIK.
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But Bungie let players see ‘Heatmaps’ online of where thousands and
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thousands of players of HALO3 died on different levels - allowing them to
visualise strategies for the game. E.g. “Kills with the Gravity Hammer in Rat’s
Nest”...
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Travel time maps / Stamen /
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This is some work by Tom Carden of Stamen for
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MySociety.org - a UK NGO that shows travel times into
central London. I live in a tiny patch of green in the SE...
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This is a little visualisation developed by Tom Carden for
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us, showing trip activity to various cities in their dopplr
colours...
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This is a piece by Shawn Allen, also at Stamen - but this
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is for HIM - he created this as a tool to find good and
bad data in the cabspotting visualisation he worked on.
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So, finally just a little bit about the how rather than the
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why.
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Actual Dopplr employees
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People
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We’re pretty small, which after working in a lot of big
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companies, I’m loving. We’re developing in the same
little room...
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Removing the need for producing loads of detailed
documentation ...

...by just having a continuous discussion. Of course, this
doesn’t scale so well... but we’re not sure we need to be
that big if we’re part of the reef.

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I really loved Dan Brown’s talk - I find that concept
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models are the things I tend to produce the most as both
documentation, and ‘boundary object’
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Bill Buxton - sketching as speciation/discussion
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That’s quite a
good metaphor
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Or ‘idea scaffolding’ as matt webb puts it. Drawing and
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drawing and drawing and discussing and discussing
concept models is our main way of working I’d say.
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Sculpting, not painting
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We work through those concept models pretty
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immediately in code. Because it’s just different when it
works and you can work it, like clay. Boris Anthony, my
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co-designer calls it ‘sculpting, not painting’
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We’re able to prototype and test new features quickly,
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both because we’re so small and the way Matt and Tom
have built Dopplr - features are ‘tags’ that we can attach
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to testers in our user community
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These are highlighted to users in the UI and we then get
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their feedback and iterate on it.
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And I’m really happy to say we’ve just taken on Celia to
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help take this to the next level - she’s going to be
working with our user community improve our design.
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hogwarts staircases
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Because we want our product to be shifting in spacetime
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like the stairs in Hogwarts -so it’s just right, just in
time.
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So maybe interaction design now isn’t painting, or
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sculpting... it’s more like being the choreographer of a
dance through spacetime.
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Thanks!
mj@dopplr.com
http://www.blackbeltjones.com
IxDA08 Savannah, Georgia
N 32° 5' 0'' W 81° 5' 59''
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12 noon(ish)
Matt Jones
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thank you very much, and thanks to IxDA for inviting me.
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This talk will be up on slideshare.net today.
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