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>> Amy Draves: Good afternoon. My name is Amy Draves, and I'm here to
introduce and welcome Dr. Beth Coleman, who is joining us as part of the
Microsoft Research Visiting Speakers Series. Beth is here today to discuss her
book "Hello Avatar: Rise of the Network Generation." Real time collaboration
and co-presence is changing the way we make connections using networked
media.
A cultural shift has been happening and most of us are living along the
continuum between the real world and the virtual one. Somehow we will show up
digitally and an Avatar will continue to represent us out there.
Dr. Coleman is a professor of writing and new media at MIT and is faculty
director of the C3 Game Culture and Mobile Media Initiative. She's currently a
faculty fellow at Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Director of
Cityasplatform Lab at Amsterdam. Last year she was a consulting researcher at
the Microsoft Research New England Lab. Please join me in welcoming her to
Microsoft.
[applause]
>> Beth Coleman: Hi, thank you. So I'm a little bit already predisposed to
knowing that you guys are awesome, because I worked with your colleagues in
Cambridge last year, and it was an incredible experience. And for me, to the
best of my ability I'd like very much kind of working between humanist kind of
social science research and then applied practice around designing technologies.
So the conversations that I've already been able to have here today with people
working on Avatars and people working on telepresence, they're quite awesome.
Okay. So I started out this project around 2007 when Second Life was in all the
media like no virtual world has gotten as much press as Second Life did around
2007, which was the top of the cycle. It was as if this virtual space was going to
give us everything we ever had imagined. You can have a beautiful body, a
great social life. You can have virtual money. You can imagine all this stuff.
And I just thought how is it that people are getting so excited about this at this
moment? Like what happened? It's not the first virtual world. It's not the first
online community, yet there was this kind of tipping point of kind of euphoria
around what it could represent.
And, of course, it all came crashing down. So I started looking at Avatars and
some of the experimental research around what does it mean to design a good
Avatar? What's persuasive? What's comfortable? And then also looking at
these simulated world. And what I walked out with a few years later was the
strong sense that if what you're designing is for a virtual space as if it's a walled
garden, as if kind of what happens in a virtual world stays in a virtual world or
whatever cliche you want to put on it, then you're mistaken.
Actually, what we should be designing for are poor spaces, spaces that take us
to the virtual and what other kind of engagements we have there and back again
into whatever you call your so-called real life.
So whether that's represented by going to work or going to the beach, but the
locater, the geographic, the kind of bodily present one. I start to call this instead
of virtual reality and reality just ex-reality, because particularly because of mobile
computing, because of the advent of mobile media in our pockets or cell phones,
we more and more are taking our company with us. We have Andre the Giant
has a posse. We have a posse. In our pockets we have our people with us in
form or another.
So part of the investigation is SMS, what does it afford us? Skype, what does it
afford us?
A virtual world, what does it afford us? What are we getting from location and
how are we getting it? Okay. So let me move on with it. So the way I've lined
this up today is thinking about this as three design principles for networked
media. And the first principle -- it's not really a principle, it's the ground work -- so
what I'm suggesting is we are already in a world that's increasingly visual.
Increasingly objectified in terms you have a notion of something you can see a
picture of it.
You get videos of things. You get 3-D models of things. Increasingly mobile as
I've discussed already. In fact, pervasively mobile. And then data-rich. And
data-rich, whether it's you tracking yourself or you're in London and all the CCTV
cameras tracking you, we are increasingly leaving a footprint about where we go.
You see that online and you see it also increasingly in the real world as you
move around. I'm talking about that as data-rich and the thing that I would like
people to keep in mind as kind of the core of what I'm essentially advocating for
here to think about with this next few years of where we're going with making
new technologies is designing for agency. Thinking about how can we make
things so people can participate and they can feel comfortable, in control.
I was talking to a friend last night and he said, you know, there's all these
promises of new technology but we're afraid to look at our in-box. There's a way
in which we're inundated, not enough filtering, these kind of practical problems
but also thinking about as we go through the world, if I've got this thing in my
hand, what more can I do with it? And what I'm aspiring today is help with some
design around culture leading and not just commerce. I know where I can buy a
cup of coffee.
I know where I can catch a train but what other kinds of things can I know about
my environment that are engaging and I mean in my aspirational world, poetic.
So summing this up I'm thinking about everything is animated. So pervasive
media, sensible objects, this whole thing of the world and Internet of things RFID,
all the rest of it, where we have our rooms, our objects becoming increasingly
animated with information.
They tell us about who is here. They tell us about what can happen. They tell us
about what they are. And there's a way in which we have to be very mindful of
not creating dumb subjects. The world is getting smarter, but are we in fact
getting dumber?
And I've got a couple of different examples of kind of the world of dumb subjects.
But just to give you a couple of just pictures of the data world, data visualization,
[inaudible] sensible cities, here's a Madonna concert. Here's the World Cup in
Rome. Yea, we see this moment in time of everybody getting on their phones.
SMS, yeah, we won, she played like a virgin so increasingly we're able to map
our spaces to kind of understand emotion.
I'd like to see not just the bird's-eye view of the data of what we do, but design for
this next level of how we can do and what we can do in those spaces.
So Pattube [phonetic] is an example of an Internet of things designed. It's from
the Hawk Architecture Group in the UK. And what they've done is they've
designed, any who have ever worked with a patch bay making music or
something, this is essentially the same idea.
But what you can patch together is any environment with another. So wireless
pollution sensor can be connected to an office. A house can be connected to a
Web page. A virtual world can be connected to a regional office.
So in effect this kind of Internet of things, design, it addresses what I'm calling
ex-reality. We're crossing between boundaries and what's valuable is the ability
for action and the sense of it being actual as opposed to whether something is
brick and mortar or virtual.
So in all this space of animation, the thing that concerns me is the increasing
sense of inertia, the increasingly dumb subject. And I want to bring that to all of
you here, because you're smart and you design smart things. And I just want to
remind you about what the experience might be on the ground in terms of we
have lots of tech. We've got lots of things, but the basic -- the quality of people's
lives, their sense of having some control over here's my many inputs and here
are my outputs and here's me moving through my world, and I have a sense of it.
I can create kind of a journey here for myself as opposed to wow all this stuff is
coming at me.
So some of it is inflection, but some of it is kind of the practicality of design. And
we've run through this scenario every time we get a kind of new shift in
technologies, networked medias, whatever it is, we go through the same
scenario of we're going to be rendered into coppertops. So you've got the desert
of the real from the [inaudible] brothers from the matrix, which is based on
[inaudible] theory about hypermediation.
You've got the spectrum of 1984 where we're tiny and big brother's always
watching us. You've got even Disneyland, which is the idea that more and more
of our lives are this kind of pretend space. It's very hard to get a sense of a
feeling of the real.
One of the illustrations of this idea of people kind of getting lost in the mix of their
own Avatars comes from the Richard Linkletter movie Scanner Darkly that came
out a few years ago, I want to show you a clip of that because it's the lowest of
the low, like it's Keanu Reeves playing a cop, and the cop is chasing himself; he
doesn't know he's chasing himself because he's searching after these drug
addicts, but of course because his [inaudible] he's the guy who he's looking for,
Total Recall. They all work that way.
And very much the equation here is overload of media. It's the same as drug
addiction. And because it's so much the everyday practice as opposed to kind of
the fantastic, I feel like it's a helpful illustration what we need to be mindful about.
But it ends up being ->>: Constantly shifting vague blur, nothing more, am I right? Let's hear it for the
vague blur. [applause].
>>: That was the other media.
>>: If you saw me on the street without the suit on you'd probably say there goes
a total dope fiend. You'd feel aversion and walk away. I don't look like you. I
can't afford to. My life depends on it. I'm not going to tell you first what I'd do as
an undercover officer engaged in tracking down dealers and the source of their
illegal drugs in the streets of our cities and corridors of our schools here in
Orange County. I'm going to tell you what I'm afraid of. What I fear night and
day is that our children, your children and my children ->>: I have two little ones, very little.
>>: But not too little to be addicted. Calculatedly addicted to substance D for
profit by drug terrorists.
>> Beth Coleman: Okay. So the basic problem here is there's a pen opt in his
head. He's under surveillance. He's a man with no faces. Yet there's no ground
truth.
In the end, you don't know whether it's delusional that he's hearing these voices.
You don't know if he's being controlled. In effect he's a lost being, and in thinking
through this kind of media as drug addiction, we're overwhelmed, we don't know
what to do with ourselves, what I kind of went to to find a way to think through
what are we supposed to do is this is the nerd version of theory. I went to
Derrida idea of the Pharmakon from Plato. And essentially this idea is you have
this poison and you see this in homeopathic remedies all the time. The remedy
here to media is more media.
Unless something catastrophic is going to happen, we actually need to find ways
to make these systems more lucid for ourselves, more lucid for users, more lucid
for engagement.
So I also want to bring in Albert Bandura's idea of agency where he talks about
interactional causal structure, because if you talk about things in a finite way or
maybe a humble way, I need to be able to have a sense that I can impact the
world I'm living in.
If you take kind of a game design theory of this, could it be something as simple
as here's a tile game, here's yellow. Here's white. I can see I have that much
impact on my system and then I can build confidence from there, I can build
strength from there.
So I'm willing to say let's start at the very small space, and we've talked already
today about one of the primary tenets of that, some of the entertainment
designed here is people having a sense of modifying for themselves.
They can take a certain set of options and they say, okay, I own this one, this is
mine. So it's even on that small level, and I do think that builds up to much
greater levels of, well, I mean, not to be too crazy about it, but you look at Tahrir
Square and some of the ways in which people are occupying public spaces in the
world, and it is individuals taking small steps and then moving toward collective
actions.
And I am happy to talk about kind of social media use and Egypt off line after
this, because I am doing a research project on that, bringing together some of
the data around the social media use and then testimony from people. But let
me stick to the Avatars at the moment.
So I'm thinking about Avatars. I went back to the earliest usage, which is from
sound skrit, and essentially the Avatar is the faces of a God. Here you have
Vishnu and Brama and Sheba [phonetic], and what you get in these images are
three faces at once. And what you get it's showing a temporal dimension.
Here's three different moments.
But it's also illustrating the idea of the god descending to do some action. And
the action has to be embodied in the body of a hero. And that kind of
mythological configuration of what an Avatar can be, what an Avatar has been
historically I found very powerful.
The idea that we somehow are descending into these forms, these other forms
that can move around in different ways so we can perform heroic actions. Here
we have Vishnu in his dwarf Avatar. So this is before the guilds, we already had
the dwarf Avatars as ancient parts of our histories, and I think it's important to
recon the Avatar descending into these other bodies to work productively with the
history of simulation that we share because they are working together.
And this is the sensorama simulator from 1962, we have a long history before
computing flight simulation, et cetera, et cetera, the military historically has
always used simulation before engines and all the rest of it.
So in thinking about designing these environments and then thinking about
Avatars as actors within that, we can go through a short history of actually
computer-based Avatar. So habitat, 1985, it was the first multi-user co-presence
virtual world.
Then you have something like the palace from 1996. You have the quest of the
Avatar which is also 1985. At the same time that habitat came out where people
started to talk about in the computer designtry, Avatars as these figures that were
moving around. Persona is also another term that's been used. But Avatar
stuck.
Then we moved to things like full spectrum warrior and like the histories
cascading. There are many, many different examples of the simulation that we
used for in this case the U.S. Army using it for training and for recruitment, also
merging with game space, play space. And it was released as open source and
people could just play with it.
And then we get to Second Life where you have Avatars sharing an environment
and there's no pretense of a game world, it's just you kind of making up whatever
configuration you want with it.
And, okay, and the last thing that I want to speak to you in terms of specifically
Avatars, this is a chart from Jeremy Baylance [phonetic] and some of his
research on what's important in terms of the representation of human beings as
Avatars, and what he found essentially was that behavior trumps various
multitude, it trumps what something looks like in terms of the possibility of an
Avatar behaving effectively in an environment.
So he goes from mirror to shadow, to puppet, to remote control car. And this is
the kind of sweet spot where the game Avatars would be.
And this is an important thing to think about in terms of where we are with the
limits of representation. And we talked already this morning about, well, is what
James Cameron did with Avatar, the movie, we have a very controlled
environment. But one that took a tremendous amount of time to be able to just
develop the technology around that.
Can any of that be translated into what we can do kind of on the fly in real time in
a shared computing environment now, and right now the answer is no. So in
thinking about where to hit with design we need to start thinking really where is
gesture. We have certain things we can do with image, but where's gesture.
So this brings me to the next set of principles, which is real time co-presence and
ex-reality. And we see real time all over the place. One of the examples I give in
the book is Lawrence Lessig giving a reading in the legal scholar Lawrence
Lessig giving a reading in his book Second Life. And what I found with that
gathering was that it worked much like a gathering at a local bookstore. So we
were able to get rid of the problem of proximity. Some people were in China and
some in New York, and everybody could get together to do something not very
fantastic. It wasn't like fighting a monster. It was to hear a book reading in a
virtual space. So that worked well enough. There were all kinds of problems
with how this space works in other respects. But that worked well enough in
terms of what we can do with real time. And in terms of co-presence, one of the
things that we're seeing trending with Skype is people not just using it for kind of
teleconferencing, which is essentially how it's designed, but people using it for
what scholar Mimi Ito calls ambient co-presence. It's often lovers who do this, I
have my window occupy in Onslow you have your window opened in Redmond
and we hear each other's day. So you have to be quite intimate with someone to
want to hear their day. Because obviously this is not eventful. It's literally the
ambient sounds of I'm making coffee I put on some music I'm on a phone call.
But just thinking about here's a technology that's been repurposed so people are
sharing space with each other, and that kind of hack, since it came directly from
users, it wasn't an intentional thing in terms of the design, I find that particularly
delightful because it's people finding all kinds of agency around something that's
been built and they're saying it's open enough that I can repurpose it in really
good ways.
So this is, again, a picture of what I'm calling ex-reality where there's a group of
plants. They do CO2 offset. You've got a group of computers linked together
and using a patch bay. It's automated in terms of the computer shut-off when
they've used too much, the emission levels are too high and you've got to wait for
things to bottom out or fill back up again with oxygen.
So this kind of feedback loop, which was the fantasy of cyber-netics from years
ago where we're able to enact this stuff in a very easy way in daily life.
So the project that I am personally putting kind of my time and effort into trying to
think about, well, how can I make these design principles like where can I enact
this stuff, is citious platform, because if indeed I am correct enough and other
people are correct enough in seeing the space of innovation is moving outside of
the desktop and into the streets, back into the world, how do we make that
translation in a way that's engaging and graceful and full of good things to do.
And the way I'm thinking about that is kind of an API for the city.
If indeed you already have an informational city that works well enough, you
know how to catch a bus. You know where to find something. You can read a
map. How do we design for a next level of engagement that somehow is beyond
the informational city. The way I'm describing that is kind of trans media story
telling or telling stories across a city.
And this can engage things that you've seen a little bit of already, which is
augmented reality kind of real time play where you get the packman around the
plots. You have in the down plots these virtual characters that you can only see
through your layer view finder.
So that's already a level of building on the habit that we're developing over
something like Foursquare where you check in but what happens after the check
in, how do we build in the next level kind of sentence structure, semantics over I
know how to check in but after I'm the mayor of this coffee shop, there has to be
another layer of engagement for me to care.
We see a plateau in that kind of with both Scavenger and Foursquare where all
you do is check in.
So to activate situational design even more so, this is a town in England where
literally they've painted their energy use on the street. So taking kind of data
visualization and bringing it back down to ground level.
This is the Jejune Institute, who ran a three-year game in San Francisco that was
an alternate reality game played throughout the city. Some of it was Web-based
but it was asking players to explore their environment with a story of this cult built
on top of familiar sites of the city.
This is an Avatar therapist from the Dexter alternate reality game that I
participated in working on for Showtime and she's the therapist for the serial
killer, and then the serial killer, you learn clues about him and she's his robotic
therapist and you find the clues online and then you go back out into the city and
you find actual objects and you get this mixture from the online to the off and so
forth.
In the season premiere they embedded sorry it's dark. They embed the logo of
the serial killer into the actual Dexter episode. And this was just a little kind of
goose for fans because they could see what we did, this fiction that we were
participating in and it made a difference. It shows up somehow in the reality, the
Canon of this world.
So the idea here is thinking about designing content and context, and it can be
online, off or this kind of ex-reality, this mixed space. And thinking about the
public and the civic and the poetic.
So help facilitating design where the secret things that you love about a place
and how you want to share them perhaps in a secret way. So kind of graffiti or
virtual one that you need to kind of get it, opt into the code system to be able to
read, that that's more and more part of what is findable in the urban spaces that
we move through.
So the beta of this is a project in 2009 called geo film and we took three different
sites and design located and media around them.
So this is stills from animation and hotel dieselly where what we did we just shot
the square, turned it in [inaudible] into a 3-D space. And then animated this
event of this landing and this explosion that was the beginning of this thriller
called the Hunter that you would play through the city.
Let's see if I can get the video to load. [Music] so this is the clip from [inaudible]
and you can see how location is strung and highlighted in the teaser.
[Music].
>> Beth Coleman: So what I'm suggesting is we can have things like a connect
ballet. We can have people out on the street playing with these things, with
these objects for greater levels of engagement, participation and a sense of
agency in these media environments that we are designing.
And there's my -- there's my list of nine principles, public, civic and poetic, those
are mashed up. And I want to -- do you have any? Do you have any questions
or any thoughts that you'd like to add to this list?
>>: I'm curious, a lot of these examples seem to be centered around
entertainment and gaming and artistic expression. But like what type of shift do
you think has to occur before you see more widespread adoption in productivity
apps or further knowledge work where they'll start using Avatars in a virtual world
to like communicate and collaborate with people?
>> Beth Coleman: I think that they're not unrelated. The examples that I am,
that I'm giving are very strongly from ideas of creative expression and gaming
and kind of art and technology. But I think that some of the habits around media
use and how people are able to have a sense of finding each other and keeping
a conversation frame together. So when you're working on a project, it's actually
very, very hard to keep track of all the pieces unless everyone is literally in the
same office or in the same lab.
And it's a problem that many of us have been addressing in our research and
how do you figure out how do you keep track and then also how can you design
for efficiency here. So, for example, I'm working with John Paufrye on digital
library for the future. We have all these archives. They're disparate. The
metadata is all different. They're not all searchable and also the way that the
actual physical libraries are being used in relationship to online information, it can
all just work better. So I get a call from the head of the libraries in Birmingham in
the UK. And she's addressing exactly the same problem. How do you make it
better usable for now, how can you create a proper digital archive. And I really
think the first problem that we have to solve here is streamlining the different bits
and pieces of research from all the different people have been doing, because it's
clear that there's redundancy.
And I'm not -- I can't guarantee that the best answer will be apparent once we
see where the points of redundancy are. But at the very least we have to figure
out how do we bring these things together because we see people working on
the same stuff.
And some of this game space and creative space and kind of design space for
play, the idea is we practice for all the other parts of our lives. They're not so
separate. So, for example, this is a really trivial difference, but I was talking to
Jim about this at lunch. It's relatively new for us that we can get our e-mail on a
kind of hand-held device which means you can be skiing or you can be at the
gym or whatever, and it's not so much the design of being able to get your e-mail,
it's the habit around how do you know when to check, how do you know when to
turn off. So how can you be a better colleague and coworker? Because being a
better colleague is not checking your mail all the time and just being stressed.
It's checking it in the right rhythm for the project. So you know when the Beijing
people are kind of awake, you know when the Stockholm people are kind of
awake. So it's something about a culture around the technologies and not only
the design of it.
So what I aspire to is this having value in spaces that are not just about
entertainment, even though I think entertainment is a pretty valuable space.
But...go ahead.
>>: Are there any studies or research saying that this is like what -- that this sort
of interaction would be what people want? Because going back to let's say the
co-presence and I think the term you used was intimate co-presence, was that it?
Yeah. In my mind I was just thinking well that sounds like being on Skype is
vicariously living through someone else. And I could see some people that might
want that.
But some of the wider ideas like cities as a platform and everything, they seem to
require a lot of prerequisites in order to have that. And when thinking about this
globally, there are a lot of countries out there, areas which are far, far away from
having any of the prerequisites to be able to have anything like this. And so
going back to like saying is this what people really want, are there any
researchers, is there any research saying that like this is really a viable thing in
terms of the way that humans want to communicate with their surroundings?
>> Beth Coleman: So Facebook is the size of a small nation. I mean ->>: Surprise you didn't mention ->> Beth Coleman: The fact that people can and do, want to share trivial
information, important trivial or -- important information at that level, in some
ways that's already established in terms of the wave of social media. Much of
social media was not about innovation and technology. It was about innovation
and behavior.
And the reason that I think it's actually a rich time to work on a city as a platform
because we have a couple of things coming on line at once. Increasingly we
have smarter cities, so the sensor networks that we need to be able to
understand the kind of data city, those are increasingly available.
The city of Amsterdam, who I've been working with, I've sat down with engineers
and computer scientists and the kind of city bureaucrats. And what they have
are huge databases of this is how people use our city. We know this about the
patterns and the question we have is: Can we use this in any way that we can
continue to try to design efficiency? We know we need more trams at this hour
because there's always a traffic jam. But in some ways that's a problem solved.
The problems that they haven't solved are how do you have help facilitate people
in neighborhoods who live next to each other for 15 years but they never talk to
each other, how can you facilitate kind of a cultural engagement. There's not a
promise that designing stories around a city and finding a big story here is the
400-year anniversary of the building of the dams which is an iconic part of the
city but there's an opportunity. There's really an opportunity.
And because people all over the world are engaging with mobile devices, and
you can say, yes, it's at different levels. But, for example, in Nairobi, they don't
have smartphones in the same kind of penetration as they do in Seattle. But my
understanding is they're about to have smartphones for about $50 or $60 a
handset.
So if I talked to Giuliani [inaudible] from [inaudible] who is designing crisis
mapping around upheaval, her question is we really successfully designed crisis
mapping for upheaval but how do we work toward designing technologies for
sustaining. So that's community building as opposed to just triage.
So these are some of the -- and we also see a lot of industry engagement in
terms of talking about making the city smarter, but we don't yet see in my view
enough engagement about helping make the people smarter. Helping the people
feel more engaged in these environments that are increasingly smart.
So those are some of the reasons that I feel like this is an incredible opportunity
because it doesn't yet exist. And we have all the pieces, we just haven't really
lined them up to say, well, what can we do here.
And we also are seeing a plateauing in online gaming and these other spaces
that had had major growth in terms of network communities engagements over
the past few years.
So it's time for kind of another moment. Go ahead.
>>: I was wondering, have you seen much focus or interest in giving individuals,
you talk about agency, control over the digital footprint and leave breadcrumbs
behind right now when people are on Facebook, they're actually creating value
for some other corporation. And I see that personally with people I know causing
pull-back from participation, perhaps a desire for more public electronic
comments or forums to participate in as opposed to playing in corporate entities
where you're being exploited or used by a corporation.
>> Beth Coleman: Yeah, I think that it's hard not to use Google or the equivalent,
even though what we do is we just add to their database.
We have a problem in terms of what's popular, like most of us use YouTube even
though there have been alternative models where people who are putting up
content could be paid a percentage. But those failed. And you'd think, well,
that's the smarter thing, why not help people get paid for their content. Yet,
YouTube, which has a very different model, is the one that dominates with users.
So I agree with you that that's, in terms of agency and kind of politics that would
be a great thing to see happen. What we have to look at is where can it happen
and how can it be kind of easily done and put in people's hands. And who is
going to do it.
For Facebook to lead on this would be incredibly valuable and it's some of what I
personally have advocated with them. But we need to see a shift there. We
need to see more demand for it. And at this moment in time people are
increasingly kind of monitoring their data systems of a combination of things, how
far they run, what they read, how fast they read, all this kind of stuff.
But the value of kind of having ownership of our data profile, it's not clear enough
to people why that would be valuable.
So there's kind of an education right there as well.
>>: Sort of like rights management technology we have where you can eliminate
the conversation.
>> Beth Coleman: Isn't it similar to, well, what's the status of the Internet in
terms of net neutrality and the rest, people don't even know why they might need
to advocate for one thing or another.
>>: I want to introduce the notion of going through this the whole notion of what's
made social media so successful at this point is Twitter, Facebook or what have
you, the western notion we're a little narcissistic. We like to embellish ourselves
and if you notice it's all about us. What you're advocating, which is very
interesting and refreshing is a more mature social media, where you're doing this
for a much more elevated, it seems, a social purpose, where it's kind of like
social media grows up and looks beyond and it's not about me, it's about my
community, and you start to extend that. Is that a proper framework or I'm
misreading it or what is your ->>: I think that people use the same social media tools to be narcissistic as they
did to create regime change in Tunisia. So some of it is context. Content and
context, Facebook work very well for strategic organizing around we're going to
rally at this point in Egypt at Tahrir Square and SMS. And the question I'm
asking if you have a certain engagement with your local community the people
who matter to you the most, when you get a co-present moment, does it enable
you to make one decision or another decision.
Yeah, it seems -- I didn't realize that that's what I was advocating, but that seems
for me that's a worthy engagement to think about, well, what if social media
grows up.
My sense of it is we've reached a certain limit in terms of I like Foursquare, but I
think that it's super limited. And you can see this in the user numbers. It's spiked
really quickly and it plateaus and it falls off. And it falls off because you can only
check in so many times and after that there has to be something to do. And in
my view, if we're kind of bringing on kind of like channelling Vishnu [phonetic] and
becoming heroes, why not?
>>: Just to add on to that, that sounds interesting to call it the growth of social
media. But I think that where we're at right now is more democracitization or a
dissent of power. The reason people can be so narcissistic is they're in control of
their data, they can do what they want. Going to the model that's the complete
opposite having someone else control your data and having someone tell you X,
Y, Z, even if it's beneficial, I'm not sure if in the -- between where we are now and
that is called a growth or is it just a cycle in terms of where the power lies in
terms of who controls what and who is pushing what agenda. Because I mean
even though this -- like some of the ideas are really good of being able to
basically utilize almost like crowd sourcing, you know, information or for the
greater good, but in the ends who is controlling it. If it's a city, then it's going to
be whatever department in the city is controlling that.
In the end, it just seems like it comes down to who controls the data. And who is
pushing what agenda, whether I'm an individual pushing my narcissistic agenda
or if I'm in some city and I'm the mayor there and I want a certain agenda, right?
>> Beth Coleman: I think you're right. I think that the moment that I'm looking at
is one of the groups that I'm working with, the current city foundation, they have
all of this information about the city of Amsterdam, and they're saying what can
we do with it, and there's always going to be a bias. There's always going to be
some control factor, but the basic design challenge I see here is can we take
some of this information and make it human readable? Can we make it human
facing in a way that's productive for people.
And to say productive there's already a bias in terms what do I think is
productive, what do you think is productive. But we design things every day.
That's just part of it. But that's the moment that I'm seeing. We have this
information. How can we engage it beyond bus routes and stopping traffic jams,
which are all worthy, but there's more to be done here, I think. Go ahead.
>>: One of the things that I see [inaudible] aware is about a generational shift.
And I go back to what [inaudible] said. When he said: Don't take credit for new
ideas, tell everybody you have accepted it and [inaudible] to die. And so I spent
a lot of time about every month or, so take my older daughters aside and query
them on what they've been doing recently, to find out that they were doing things
that I wouldn't have expected with Avatars and social media. For example, my
middle daughter was playing hide-and-go-seek in World of War Craft with her
friends. They weren't battling monsters, they were playing hide-and-go-seek
because they could do it. The older, I asked her if your employer in the future
asked you to see your Facebook page would you open it up to him or her. She
said, yeah. The only reason she's locked down, until this is locked down is
because I told her to be. But her view was what the hell, people know who I am.
And I see the comments sometimes in meetings like this about, well, this is what
the expectations are and this is what the expectations are. It's from old people.
It's not from the young generation. They don't care. They don't have the same
set of values. I think the generational curve will shift more because they see
things fundamentally different.
Another question related was not only generational, but cultural. That some of
the statements you've made applies to a western society. But the way I look, I
spent a lot of time in Asia, lived in Japan for a while, I don't see them map that
way in the same way you described them. So how much of what you've looked
into draws a distinction between what's generally a western view and therefore
applies to the problem set and what ->> Beth Coleman: That's very good. People have asked me that before. And
I've got a first design site for Amsterdam, but this is about platform and designing
flexible tools and for it to work it needs to be able to translate itself to different
environments.
So I mean we have a very strong game culture in Asia, but it doesn't mean that it
maps to the kind of gaming that I'm describing. Certainly there is interest in
specifically Nairobi is the city where I know people and have started to talk about
this project, because they said we want to think about the Poetic, we want to
think about the sustainable. We want to talk about kind of community tools and
not just crisis.
So I can't extrapolate. I agree with you that my framing, it comes from a western
perspective and it will first be kind of addressed to a western city. But
Amsterdam is carefully chosen because it's also a very important kind of global
city with like a 400-year history of different kinds of people coming through and
also what its population looks like now.
So as opposed to someplace like New York or someplace -- I mean, San
Francisco or LA might be more interesting along those lines also. But in trying to
think about what's a good test zone, because you have the Moroccan youth of
Amsterdam. You have the older traditional Dutch communities of Amsterdam.
You have these kind of traveler crews coming through, so you have like a mixed
population that represents kind of the future of what global cities will look like.
And Shanghai is not mono culture either. So there's ways in which we're trying
to practice in one local, some things about trying to think globally and what does
it mean to try to design globally if culture is part of what you're doing, it's not just
handing somebody a computer and saying, okay, turn it on. Maybe some of that
is cultural, too, but I think that's helpful what you said.
>>: How close the question is there. Thank you so much for joining us.
>> Beth Coleman: You're welcome.
[applause]