Humanism at the MIT Media Lab’s TEI Conference??!

When you spend any amount of time at the MIT Media Lab, you start to realize a few things:

1. You aren’t nearly as smart as you think you are.
2. Science and engineering research are leaps and bounds beyond commercialized products.
3. The geeks are begging for design. Literally.

I just spent a few days at the Tangible and Embedded Interactions Conference, and came to these realizations as I tried to synthesize lectures and demonstrations that included:

A robot that paints pictures based on shadows:

A cloth that responds to physical gestures and flexing, changing the way music is played:

A system for tracking tangibles embedded in natural objects in our home:

A digital version of the game Go:

Lightscapes that intend to provide a shared light vocabulary for products:

A painting tool to draw using words directly sourced from twitter:

A gear-based music and rhythm visualization system:

John Frasier’s keynote was a provocative start to the conference, offering what seemed to be both a plea and a demand that technology become humanized. As Frasier walked through a retrospective of 3D construction kits and architectural modeling aids, it became clear that the thread through his work was a desire to abstract “interface” to something implied. As he concluded, cities of the future have the ability to communicate with one another, and “the city has become the interface.” He isn’t speaking metaphorically, either – he sees a world where roads with sensors publically report about themselves, buildings reconfigure themselves as they become bored, and the systems act in a manner described as self-generative. The Neal Stephenson inspired vision isn’t far-fetched, either; the work he showed, dating back to 1979, indicates that the limitations on achieving this vision are entirely social and human – the engineering and science has already been proven.

Brygg Ullmer seems to have come to the same conclusion. In an almost ironic presentation of his own work, Brygg – whom the technologists may recognize as the creator of (among other things) tangible media blocks, data tiles, and metaDESK – made a plea for compassionate assistance from “graphic designers.” His work has traditionally taken a focused and explicit view of individual tangible tools, and he’s now seeking to view systems in a larger ecology. It will take more than a graphic designer to bring together the disparate systems Brygg seeks to unify. As he describes, “I’m so flat… I don’t know how to use curves very well.” The work of tangible computing – where my coffee cup has some form of awareness, and various physical icons (phicons) are strewn around my house – is blurry and amorphous, or “curved”. Again, the vision of a seamless, interconnected ecosystem of digitalness is held back by social and organizational barriers, and not in any great way by engineering.

Presenter after presenter described or illustrated a need for the human and humane, yes the questions they fielded highlighted the ever-present and always growing void between the technologists and the humanists. Karl Willis presented a system for gestural sketching – almost dancing – in physical space and producing beautiful sculptural elements in plane-style cross sections, yet one of the first questions he was posed was that drawing was not very intuitive, and would he think about adding an Undo feature? Eva Hornecker asked the audience “how many of you have used a conceptual framework in design?” – and less than a dozen hands went up.

There has always been an obvious tension between the technologists and the humanists, and it’s become apparent that issues of fundamental engineering know-how are no longer the primary barrier for bringing dramatic and magical new capabilities to real life. I built an electroluminescent display in under two hours during a studio session at the conference, with little knowledge of either the chemistry or electrical means by which it works (the display worked, incidentally, but I didn’t dare bring it on the airplane, lest TSA try to humanize my technology themselves). The scientific building blocks exist in both quantity and accessibility; it is imagination that is now the rare element in technology research. Hiroshi Ishii praised the work of Patrick Tobias Fischer and Christian Zöllner as being the best in the conference, describing that there is a “philosophy and a message to all their work.” He’s right – the SMSlingshot brings the power of anarchistic graffiti to the masses, and offers meaning through a focus on cultural criticism, behavioral change, and intent. It isn’t just cool technology (and in many ways, the technology is quite mundane as compared to some of the fancier advancements being presented); the slingshot has a human aesthetic.

It is these elements of human aesthetic – meaning, criticism, behavior, and intent – that describe the value of design. I often cite Richard Buchanan’s statement that interaction design is the “new liberal art of technological culture.” I offer it again, and I hope the hackers, geeks and cyborgs inspired by the media lab will increasingly turn to interaction designers not for their ability to do “graphic design”, but instead to help shape a message, intent, and larger sense of cultural judgment for the work.