For those of us interested in how humans interact with our machines, how socio-technical systems are made and how they make us, this is a precious moment. Tomorrow the probability waveforms collapse, Schroedinger’s cat will be let out of the bag; Apple will reveal the form of their long-rumoured slate. In the realisation of a new kind of computing device many decisions are made. Not many companies are equipped to make and execute those decisions well. At the moment I can think of two: Apple and Palm. And as Palm is otherwise engaged, it falls to Apple to bring us the first fully-realised such device.

That’s why today, the moment before the Apple tablet is unveiled, is precious. From tomorrow it will be impossible to imagine a slate without reference to Apple’s design, just as now all smartphones are compared to the iPhone.

Mockups in scale

So before it’s too late, here’s what I’ve learned from six months living with iSlate prototypes.

The iPhone is Alan Kay’s Dynabook in the deck-of-cards form factor. Now Apple are ready to make the full-sized version; the paperback form factor. Kay put it at 8 by 5 inches – 10 inches diagonally. The size of a small paperback book, or a sheet of A4 folded in half (which is to say, A5). We know that this form factor is important. But it’s been hard to stop thinking of computers as anything other than television-typewriters.

The TV-typewriter form factor has found its epitome in the laptop as we know it: hinged keyboard-and-screen, trackpad and desktop metaphor. Shall I enumerate its faults? Too big and fragile to carry in an ordinary bag, we must instead heft special laptop bags with padded compartments and room for little else. Too energy-hungry for sustained use away from power. A screen that doesn’t work in sunlight. Too heavy to use while carrying. When equipped with processors fast enough to run a modern desktop operating system and 3D graphics, it’s too hot to actually use on a lap. The laptop is wonderfully portable, but not truly mobile.

The A5 dynabook won’t be better for all tasks. However it will afford different activities to those afforded by the laptop, desktop workstation and handheld device, and thereby expand the range of human creativity. That makes it exciting.

However Apple’s version will have its own affordances and constraints. It will be optimised for certain tasks; there’s more than one way to skin a universal computing device. From tomorrow we are in danger of forgetting that.

I’m conducting PhD research into creativity support tools, through a process of building and testing prototypes. Some of the prototypes have been slates, of various shapes and sizes. Form factors made from foamcore, weighted with aluminium; interactivity simulated with my (jailbroken) iPhone. I’ve been carrying them around and imagining how they fit into various scenarios. Here are some things I’ve learnt:

1. Size & Weight, and thus Connectivity

- 7-inch tablets beat 10-inch for portability. You can fit one in a coat pocket or a purse. But they’re small enough that  you can actually lose one. You’ll want a GPS tracker in that thing.

- Say a 10-inch tablet is 500g, splitting the difference of four iPhones or iPods Touch. That’s the weight of a medium-sized book, and much less than a laptop. For example a Macbook Air is 1360 g and a 15” Macbook Pro is 2490 g. That weight is great for portability and reading, but for one-handed interactivity you actually want lighter. The lighter you go, the more you can do and the more likely you are to carry it around. No hard drive. A Flash drive is light enough. For longevity put a memory card slot in the thing; then as memory prices plummet it’ll keep getting more useful. When costing this thing out for engineering, the primary cost you care about isn’t dollars, it’s weight.

- The most effective way to lose weight is to put things outside the tablet.  Files, and also processing. Voice recognition, 3D, video editing: control them from the tablet, but do the processing somewhere else. You should be able to control a desktop workstation from this, and also invisibly use all kinds of services that run on remote servers. This implies full-time connectivity; not just wifi but 3G and whatever comes next. It doesn’t matter how you get the connectivity there: people will still carry phones so tethering is an option.

2. Colour and Form

A black bezel is a terrible idea for e-reading; you want a white margin around a page of text. Ideally the margin is interactive and can hold annotations anyway, so you just want all screen. If there has to be a bezel, make it as seamless as possible (and possibly accepting touch input). If there’s a rim, it should be white or silver.

3. Keyboard & Other Inputs

- A 10-inch tablet can fit a full-size on-screen keyboard in landscape orientation.

- Typing on a full-size keyboard with one hand is a pain. Set it down on a surface and it works. Or turn the slate to portrait, and you have a keyboard that you can use with one hand while you hold the slate with the other.

- If you’re writing long documents, a bluetooth keyboard is fantastic.

Slate with bluetooth keyboard

- Other input devices are great too. Game controllers, motion sensors, everything. Artists want a stylus for pressure-sensitivity. More inputs multiply possibilities. But ensure that you can use the stock configuration with multitouch alone, because every input is also a dependency.

4. Collaboration

- A slate in a meeting room is nothing like a laptop in a meeting room. A laptop naturally faces the user; a slate naturally goes face-up on the desk. If you flip it up for privacy then it’s obvious that’s what you’re doing. So:

- Slates afford information sharing in meetings. Sketch, pass it around the table. And here we find an implication for design.

Design problem:

In meetings sketching is a common form of expression and communication for creative ideation. When teleconferencing, remote participants are either left out of this sketching process, or it stops.

Opportunity:

Tablets can help, because digital sketches can be transmitted between locations. Draw on a tablet here, have it appear on a tablet there. The remote participants can then add to or annotate the sketch; communication is enhanced and the flow of collaborative ideation is unbroken. Win!

Extension:

People also like to sketch with concrete tools (pencil and paper, arrangements of sticky notes, whiteboards, butcher’s paper etc). Tablets could have a camera or even a full-surface scanner, and thereby capture those analog sketches in digital format. This affords greater sharing with remote participants, review and archiving of materials, and with OCR and metadata, search & retrieval.

5. Capture & annotation

This leads me to an affordance I haven’t fully understood yet: slates afford rich annotation. You need a responsive screen: e-ink won’t do, but a Pixel-Qi transflective or something similar is ideal. But if you have that, then you can capture images, either by drawing or photographing. And then you can start to annotate the images, directly manipulating them on the device.

Slate as a sketchbook in a gallery

The surface is large enough to work with, and the infinite depth afforded by zoom means there is plenty of room. Every image can be a rabbithole; a portal to an information space without inherent limit. 10 inches in the diagonal, and infinity in the z-axis. Jeff Raskin, Ken Perlin, Ivan Sutherland and the other Zooming UI inventors have a great deal to teach us here.

Right. I have more, but it’s unformed. Let’s hope that after 5 AM Sydney time tomorrow I can still think clearly about imaginary tablets as well as the real.

Because if it would, then:
1. you are using an obscure technical term for something that already has a perfectly good plain English word, and
2. you are using that technical term incorrectly.

Yes, I know that languages are living entities. None other than the eminent Don Norman, despairing in his attempts to correct the misuse of “affordances”, has cited this as a reason to abandon the term to its abusers. Yes, words can change their meanings. Generally, I celebrate this fact. But not this time. Technical terms are different. People can start calling air “Oxygen”, but that does not mean that scientists should change the periodic table.

And this is an important technical term. It describes something very specific for which there is no other word. When J.J. Gibson went to the trouble of making up the word “affordances” in 1977 he thought long and hard about it first, and he coined it carefully so that it actually makes sense. An affordance is “something that is afforded”.

“The affordances of the environment are what it offers to the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or for ill” [1]

Affordances are not the cues in the environment that let you know that something is afforded to you. Affordances can be hidden, or perceived. Designers can make them easier to perceive by adding cues. Cues can lie, but affordances cannot: they are what actually is possible. We need a word for what the environment actually makes possible, and affordances is that word.

There is no reason to misuse the term “affordances” when you really mean “cues”. If you hear someone else misusing it (and I don’t care if it is Jared Spool), then call them out. We need this word back, and if language is indeed made by its users, well that is us. We can make the choice to use this word well, or to waste it.

Thank you for your attention.

V.

[1] Gibson, J.J., 1977, “The Theory of Affordances” in Perceiving, acting, and knowing: toward an ecological psychology
eds. R. Shaw, J. Bransford, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ.

It looks like this is the Gemstar patent.

The reason I write is that I was working for Optus Multimedia, a division of Optus Vision back in 1998, and in that year I made an EPG in a grid layout, for delivery on the web (including a WebTV version).

So without further ado, here is some prior art for EPGs with a grid layout, from May 1998.

Note: grid layout, customise button for changing order of channels, and tiny WebTV-compatible resolution

Take a look at the wonderful Immersive Workspaces from Linden Lab and Rivers Run Red. Wonderful because it’s a great piece of work and a real breakthrough, but also because it’s not done yet. That is, if its goal is as stated “a complete collaboration solution”, and “the ultimate destination in real-time collaboration”.

Immersive Workspaces - avatars view slides in a virtual meeting room

You see, what they’ve built looks like a great solution for real-time communication and coordination – but that’s not the same thing as collaboration. Let’s take a look. I’ll wait here while you watch the the video [link updated].

The system provides the following task-oriented headings: News, Team, Meetings, Actions, Media, Journal, Stats, Admin, and Go 3D. This is looking like the next generation of groupware, with that last link promising a sprinkle of social avatar-chat sugar on top, courtesy of Second Life.

The use case shown is called a “collaboration session” – but let’s look at what the participants (Laura, Adam and Sakura) actually do.

1. Laura and Adam don headsets, sit down at PCs and log on. They can now talk to each other and see their avatars.
2. Their avatars enter a virtual presentation room, with chairs oriented toward a representation of a projection screen.
3. Sakura’s avatar appears, joining the chat: “Sorry to keep you waiting. I’ve just uploaded my slides for us to take a look at”.
4. The avatars appear to look at the slides and discuss them.So far we have communication. Note that the “real work” – preparing and uploading the slides – was done before entering the virtual world.
5. Adam is asked to add something to the presentation. He exits the virtual world, from his point of view: he’s now working full-screen on the presentation while his avatar stays in the virtual room.
6. Now the magic – Adam’s changes appear on the projection screen within the virtual presentation room.Here we have something new – a moment of actual collaboration. However note that if Sakura and Laura wanted to join Adam in editing the presentation they would both have to exit the virtual world as well, moving over to screen sharing.Now we return to the virtual world, and with it we shift back from collaboration to coordination.
7. Laura approves the changes, and directs Adam and Sakura to perform various tasks outside the virtual world. In the video we can see them nod their heads in assent – invisibly to Laura, though.

Adam exits the virtual environment to work on a document

Taken as a whole then, Immersive Workspaces is a collaboration solution. It’s interesting to see the dividing lines emerge: Communication takes place in the virtual world, collaboration in the bundled screen-sharing application, and everything’s coordinated in the bundled groupware.While in the immersive virtual world participants ignore the real world. When they leave it to use something else (like screen sharing) they maintain the sense of shared place by pretending that they’re still there.

The design of the virtual environment reinforces this implicit division; it’s a seminar room. The slides are up on a presentation screen, to be shown rather than collaboratively manipulated. All this is ideal for communicating ideas but it’s not a place that particularly affords active collaboration.

I think there are other designs that can remove this divide, and the focus on immersion is in the way of realising those designs. On this blog I hope to show you what I mean.

We have no central office and everyone involved is in a different part of the world.

They’re a cross-disciplinary, geographically distributed team. Which raises the question:

So how do we work efficiently on our projects?

They tried asynchronous work but then started getting better results with synchronous chat sessions, sending images back and forth. Then breakthrough – they introduced a shared workspace, which they describe as a virtual room. It’s one-way and ad-hoc, but it’s working. And there is definitely a design opportunity for better creativity support tools in this space.

I recently posted an idea for ad-hoc workspace sharing for under $US 500/person. The idea is simple: get one of the new LED-based micro projectors, tape it to a webcam and point them at a surface. Then everything the camera sees can be projected back onto the same surface, or more interestingly to a remote setup along the same lines. Now two people at different locations can share a workspace.

When figuring out how to prototype this, I then thought of the ubiquitous angle-poise task lamp. Apparently Anglepoise is actually a brand, which I did not know – it’s the true original, designed by George Carwardine in the UK in 1934. It’s this lamp that Jac Jacobsen found in a shipment of sewing machines, licensed and redesigned in 1937, resulting in the classic Luxo L-1 luminaire. Some version of this architects’ lamp then inspired John Lasseter to animate Luxo Jr., the short film that became the spirit of Pixar.

Now, I’m going for low-cost, ad-hoc and ubiquitous. I’m not going to use a $200 Luxo L-1 or Anglepoise Original 1227. Not unless I find a new source of funding, anyway In any case, it’s more appropriate for me to use the most low-cost, ubiquitous version of this superbly functional modern design: IKEA’s TERTIAL. $18.95 from my local IKEA in Sydney, $8.99 in the US.

The height is perfect to throw a 30cm/12″ diagonal display from the 3M MPRO110 Micro Projector, and if you remove the lamp assembly the projector fits beautifully in its place, with room to spare for a webcam. Here’s my blueprint and a shot of the design in situ. If you make one too, we can try them out.

Next is to design and implement some user interaction methods. One quite nice thing is that the field of view of the camera is wider than the lightfield of the projector. This means that we can use the projected area for direct manipulation of things in the mediaspace, and use the area around it as a gestural interaction zone for anything that effects the mediaspace as a whole. Some sketches:

and

3M MPRO110 Micro Projector: $US 300

= $USD 449 (= $AUD 626) plus something for shipping.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt1_4Hr_-FA

Tape them together, point them at a surface in arm’s reach, set up a screen-sharing videoconference with someone else with the same setup, and you can share a projected workspace. Cheap, fast and adaptable.

To use or to simulate the seal is not permitted… but why merely simulate, when you can beat reality at its own game? Enter the hyperreal.

Or indeed, the hyper-seal. Forget staid heraldry. This shield is a 3D object protruding into the space. Not a depiction, a virtualisation.  The eagle is… surfing on the shield? Surmounting it, anyway, and crushing the arrows and the olive branch beneath its talons. Instead of “E Puribus Unum” (Out of Many, One), we have THE UNION AND THE CONSTITUTION FOREVER, like a sailor’s tattoo.

This eagle says I MADED YOU A GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE BY THE PEOPLE FOR THE PEOPLE BUT I EATED IT.