Personal information ecologies erickson

Personal Information Ecologies:
PIM in the Age of Sensors and Social Networks

Thomas Erickson * Thanks to Jonathan Feinberg for his great service at http://wordle.net

Social Computing Group
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

CSCW 2012 Workshop on Personal Information Management
Bellevue, Washington
February 12, 2012

Preface
is is a keynote for the CSCW 2012 Workshop on Personal Information
Management (PIM). e tag cloud on the previous page shows the content of the
submissions abstracts, with very common terms, like PIM, omitted.

I come at PIM from two directions. I have long made concerted (some would say
obsessive) efforts to design ways of managing my own personal information. And
I’ve also worked on PIM research and development projects, primarily in the late
80’s and early 90’s during my years at Apple – so I come to the topic with a bit of
perspective – and the fabled 20-20 hindsight.

In this talk I reflect on my research, and the lessons that were learned (or that
should have been learned). ese include the spatial nature of PIM, hunters and
gatherers, guilt piles; and the Prime Dogma of PIM. I also discuss how things
have changed since then, and offer two provocative examples of some of the new
forms of PIM that are emerging as we see the rise of sensor-generated personal
information, and the increasing use of PIM as a social currency.

© 2012 Thomas Erickson Social Computing Group, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center slide 2

The Talk
Looking Backward: A Walk Down Memory Lane
•  PIM in the Material World
•  Making PIM Digital

How Things have Changed!

Looking Forward: Two Provocative Examples
•  Social Meets Sensors
•  Death Don’t Have no Mercy


PIM in the Material World
In the footsteps of Tom Malone
  How Do People Organize Their Desks? (1983)

  Note that we were not the first to study PIM. We took
inspiration from the work of Tom Malone, and others.

Look, an adding machine,
how cool is that?

The Artifacts Study (circa 1989–90)
  How do you manage your personal information?
Show us the tools you use. Walk us through your day.
Tell us about a failure of your system.

Yes, the picture in front is
not circa 1990, but it’s
apt. e one in back is of
Apple in that era…


The Artifacts Study: Items of interest
  Daytimer, notebook, post-its, tape recorder, voice
mail, files & folders (paper), stacks, &c
  PCs with their files & folders,
email, floppy disks, &c
  And of course the practices
in which these artifacts
were embedded

Notice all the artifacts, and
how they’re distributed around
the landscape of the oﬃce.


The Artifacts Study: ‘Findings’ A Hunter’s Office
  A spectrum of styles: Hunters and Gatherers

Hunters
  Hunters exert relatively little
energy organizing incoming
information.
  Like often ends up with like
  Effort is spent finding
information when it is needed
  But hunters usually know
where to search, because they
they know the ‘habits’ of
their information, and that it
tends to be found in certain
territories



Gatherers
  Gatherers exert lots of A Gatherer’s Office
energy organizing incoming
information.
  Information is organized to
support particular tasks
using artifacts and personal
‘systems’ (e.g., notations)
  A Gatherer, at least in theory,
needs to exert little effort to
find things. They are ‘at hand’



The Hunter-Gatherer Tradeoff
  Hunters’ systems are robust: A Gatherer’s Office
they are not very efficient,
but they rarely fail badly
  Gatherers’ systems are fragile:
if a gatherer gets overloaded,
and fails to invest the energy
to keep the system working,
catastrophic collapse can occur



Some Design Implications
  If Gatherers have to hunt, A Gatherer’s Office
they usually fare poorly because
they’ve created an artificial
terrain and can’t guess where
the information will be

  The unified in-box concept
(one place for email, voice
mail, faxes, etc.)
•  It’s not great for Hunters
because it mixes different
stuff together in one place.
•  And Gatherers don’t want
them either – they want to
get stuff out of the inbox


The Artifacts Study: ‘Findings’ A Guilt Pile

The “Guilt Pile”
  A document or piece of mail arrives
  You don’t have time to deal with it…
  …and so you put it on a pile on your desk

I particularly like how this pile is
delicately balanced on desk’s edge



  As time passes the pile grows larger
  You can see things embedded in it
  You begin to feel uncomfortable





  Finally, prompted by its growing mass
  Or a glimpse of something you have to deal with
  You sort through it





  Finally, prompted by its growing mass
  Or a glimpse of something you have to deal with
  You sort through it

  You can discard quite a bit of no longer relevant stuff
  You pick out a couple of things to deal with
  You put the smaller, neater, more stable pile back
  And you feel good


“Guilt Pile” Design Implications
  An effective instance needs to be visible
  Ideally, it is composed of non-uniform materials
so that its content is legible
  And so that its state reflects the amount of
effort that has been put into it

And more generally
  Our ability to effectively do PIM
is bound up with our sense of self,
our feelings of self-efficacy,
and our public images

It is only with the advent of the iPhone®
that artifacts for digital PIM have
achieved the beauty and symbolic weight
of the leather-clad Day Runner™, et al.



A side note on the “Guilt Pile”
  Others designed and implemented digital “piles”
  While the design had many nice features,
it was not true to the eco-systemic nature of piles:
  The system would automatically sub-divide and
straighten the piles, eliminating the guilt-driven
sorting and winnowing of the pile…
Self-organizing
and self-sorting
digital piles were
cool, but they lost
the power of
Guilt, a key ally
in the battle
against entropy


The Accountants Study

A visit to KPMG
  Observations
  Interviews
  Presentation of a vision:
an online library of the company’s reports

Findings
  Accountants are largely Gatherers
  Interesting artifacts (clipping notebooks) and practices
(skimming, annotating, meta-auditing)
But they weren’t actually very interested in
  And the enthusiastic but yet deflating response to
the content of the reports. ey wanted to
“Do you think you would use this?”  Yes, but…
use the reports to find out who the authors
were. en they’d call up the author to find
out the politics, and the dirt, and useful
trivial stuff like what kind of Scotch the
CEO liked. … And of course after that,
they owed the author a favor…

The Points
  Much PIM is mediated by artifacts,
and involves sometimes elaborate practices
  PIM also takes place in space:
where the artifacts are matters… and it’s not arbitrary
  Some PIM is not mediated by artifacts:
it’s managed by keeping it in the head, and by oral transmission


Making PIM Digital
Rosebud (1990–93)
  Designing a Desktop Information System:
Observation and Issues (CHI 1991)

Information access for ordinary users
  Focus on the “10,000 database” problem…
  …and user discomfort with query languages
  But also addressed the PIM-ish problems of
finding and re-finding

ere is much about
this paper that now
seems quite quaint. …
How on earth will
users manage to use
query languages? But
at least we assumed
they wouldn’t…

Making PIM Digital
Rosebud (circa 1990)

The User Interface
  Reporters searched databases
  and maintained columns in
a personal newspaper
  newspaper readers
could save articles of
interest to a notebook

  Reporters and newspapers
were Hunter-oriented…
  Notebooks were, of course,
for Gatherers


Making PIM Digital
Rosebud

The Notebook
  Temporal organization
(like a pile)
  Use of annotations
(as observed on paper)
  “Bird’s-eye-view” to
leverage annotations

Quaint or not,
I still want this!


Making PIM Digital
Rosebud

The Results
  Reporters and a Newspaper
implemented as a product called
“Apple Search”, which failed…
  Notebooks not implemented


Making PIM Digital
Proteus (~1993-96)

A Personal Notebook
  Implemented in HyperCard
  Used for several years
  Various means use to track
and analyze use

is paper remains among the
most popular on my personal
site – however, I have no idea
where the hits are coming from.

Making PIM Digital
Proteus (~1993-96)

Structure
  ToC showing Sections
  … and subsections of
selected section
  With a set of navigation,
annotation, and searching
controls along the bottom


Making PIM Digital
Proteus (~1993-96)

Structure
  Sub-section ToC showing
first line of each page


Making PIM Digital
Proteus (~1993-96)

Structure
  And a content page


Making PIM Digital
Proteus (~1993-96)

Two comments
  A huge amount of
idiosyncratic complexity
co-evolved over time
•  Header creation and
reuse in ToC
•  Separators
•  Ability to “post”
to-do’s
I would not have wanted
any of this when I started
using the notebook


Making PIM Digital
Proteus (~1993-96)

Two comments
  A huge amount of
idiosyncratic complexity
co-evolved over time
  The unconsidered
incorporation of an
email button changed
everything!


Making PIM Digital
Proteus (~1993-96)

Synergy!
  Because I could easily
email notes, I took care
to take better notes:
more detail, context, etc
  Because my notes were
better, they were more
useful to me later, and
easier to search for

My ‘Prime Dogma of PIM’
  The way in which one uses personal information,
shapes its creation, maintenance and management,
which in turn shapes its use


Making PIM Digital

The Points
  Throughout, there was a focus on creating
digital variants of PIM artifacts
  We were intent on cramming it all into the digital
box that (mostly) sat on the desk.

  We didn’t (or couldn’t) follow up on
•  Spatial/ecological aspects
(Hunters and Gatherer’s use of space)
•  Social aspects
(Some types of personal information stay ‘in the
head’ and are shared orally and person to person)


Making PIM Digital
The Points

The Prime Dogma is still true
  Use  PI  Use’  PI’…

  For instance, “AudioNote”
on the iPad is changing my
note-taking now
  As is Siri on the iPhone
We underestimate how big
a diﬀerence making things
radically easy makes. Siri
now knows who my Mom
is, and where I live.

The Moral
  If the use of personal information is so important to how we do PIM,
then we may wish to pay close attention to how those uses are shifting…


How Things Have Changed!

1995 - 2005


Personal Info in the Public Sphere

The one thing I was right about
• “A personal page is a carefully constructed
portrayal of a person.”

• “For the first time, individuals can
project huge amounts of detailed
information about themselves to
a mass audience”

• “On the positive side, it enables new search
strategies based on our social knowledge,
it lowers the social cost of accessing and sharing
information, and it makes the Web a more
interesting and engaging place.”
is section is a list of
things I failed to
anticipate… but at
least I got this right!

The Rise of (Private) Social Networks, Sharing and Broadcasting
  Friendster (2002), Orkut (2004), Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006), Linked In (2002)…

One reason that
such private social
networks proved
viable was…

The Success of Online Advertising
  Once upon a time it wasn’t clear how to make money
by advertising on the web (hard to believe, but true!)
  But once it is true, personal information becomes quite valuable,
and of interest to Others…

And once online
advertising becomes viable,
personal information
becomes valuable!

The Rise of PIM Intermediaries Lots of entities are interested
  All I wanted was to download a paper in where I go on the web!
  All Docstoc.com wanted was Ghostery: tracking trackers


Self-Tracking
Mycrocosm: Visual Microblogging, Assogba and Donath
  Although it goes back quite a ways,
Manual and automatic self-tracking
has become quite a phenomena

And the owners of personal
information are developing new
interests in using it as well

Cheap Popular Sensors is had started by
  Digital pedometers ‘05, but it is really
  Heart rate monitors coming on now!
  miCoach – real time coaching
are making it increasingly
easy to generate lots of
very personal data


The Points
  People are projecting their personal information into the public sphere
  They are also amassing more and more personal information in digital form
  And there are an increasing range of venues in which it may be used

And so if you believe in the Prime Dogma of PIM, these are very interesting times!


Two Thought-Provoking Examples
Lose-It
•  Social Meets Sensors


Lose-It
•  Set your goal
•  Track your weight


Lose-It
•  Buy a wifi scale
•  Use an iPhone app
•  Or a Fitbit®, or…


Lose-It
•  Share it with friends
Personal information
•  and talk about it
provides grist for
conversation


Lose-It
•  Join a team


Lose-It
•  Share you successes and
failures with the team
•  and everyone else on Lose-It
And can serve as a sort
of social currency in
the community


Lose-It
•  and do the weekly
weigh-in by entering
your weight in a
Google Doc

If you miss your
weekly weigh-in,
you get “benched”

Lots of weights
reported to the tenth of
a pound – digital
scales in action?

Lose-It
•  Not public enough for you?
– configure Twitter and
Facebook to publish
your updates


And there’s more
  Lose-it is just one example…


Death Don’t Have No Mercy
  Yesterday Samuel Pepys tweeted several times
  …even though he’s been dead for over 300 years


Who is this fellow?
  Samuel Pepys (“peeps”)
  London, 17th Century
  Rose from humble beginnings to
become Secretary of the Navy
  Kept a diary from about 1660 to 1670
  These were interesting times
•  English Civil War
•  Restoration of Charles II
•  Great Fire of London
•  The Plague
•  And a number of more personal
events of interest only to the salacious
  Diary was for Pepys’ eyes only
– entries often telegraphic and cryptic


Phil Gyford and PepysDiary.com
  Pepys diary republished as a blog
  Each day’s entry posted at 11pm London
time (lagged by 344 years)
  Every day people arrive and ‘unpack’ each
day’s entry in the comments

  PepysDiary.com has been successful
•  Now in its 9th year
•  Steady stream of visitors
•  Core of consistent commentators
•  Very interesting conversations


Why It’s Interesting
  Collaborative unpacking of entries
  People contribute in a variety of ways
•  Defining archaic word uses
•  Providing historical other context
•  Asking questions
•  Creating cross references
•  Providing niche expertise on topics:
e.g., kidney stones, fishing, cannon
•  Reprimanding ‘Sam’ for his many
personal failings

  Participants clearly find this fun and
engaging, and many return regularly
  It provides a very interesting window into
understanding a particular place and a time

A lovely example of the use of personal
information – this time not your own! –
as a social currency

The Point
  is simply that new uses of personal information are constantly emerging
  and if we believe “Use  PI  Use’  PI’…”, we need to study them!


Wrap Up
Once Upon a Time
  Much PIM was done via material artifacts
  Distributed through a local landscape
  According to Hunter and Gatherer logics

  Some PIM was oral and socially mediated


Wrap Up
Then PIM became digital
  It got crammed into the box on the desk
  And we mostly lost sight of its spatial
and social aspects


Wrap Up
But things have changed, and are changing…


Wrap Up
What should this look like next year?

I’m happy to chat, if you don’t mind
occasional lags in the rhythm of email

–Tom snowfall@acm.org

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