[now updated with prototype images]

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.

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.

- 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.

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

It might be considered a little silly to carry around blocks of shiny foam that don’t do anything. Nonetheless. And @timbomb tells me that I’m conducting a phenomenological investigation, so there.

So why these sizes?

Because they’re natural sizes, products of cultural evolution that are worth paying attention to. The model for this idea is the iPod (and by extension the iPhone) – the Deck of Cards form factor (a 3.5 inch screen). Below that on the stack is what I call the Penguin Classic, or the Paperback form factor (which corresponds to a 7 inch screen). Finally we have the Hardback (a 10 inch screen).

You see a deck of cards could take any form, but it took this one. We humans settled on that shape and size; even the details like rounded corners. So let’s extend the thought: what other forms have evolved? People love the Penguin paperback form factor. Small enough for a coat pocket or a purse, large enough to be legible. A hardback makes a different tradeoff; a bit more room for text and illustrations, and a bit less portability. We choose these forms.

Laptops as we know them have a different tradeoff; they are constrained by the keyboard. Text entry has been a primary mode of interaction since the command line, and any proper computer is supposed to have a proper keyboard. I’m typing this on a 15 inch MacBook Pro, which is all very nice. I can work in any room of my house, and bring a full-scale computer wherever I need one. But whenever possible I don’t take it with me. It won’t fit in a normal bag, only specialised laptop bags with padded compartments that leave little room for anything else. It’s too heavy to carry on my back on a long bike ride and too fragile for the panniers. This is tricky because I work digitally, online, in many different places. My iPhone has made it possible to leave the laptop behind far more often. The tiny screen is worth it for the portability.

But I’d be happier with a form factor that was somewhat less portable. The paperback in particular is ideal for mobile use. It’s easy to bring everywhere, almost unnoticed in the small bag I was taking anyway, or in a coat pocket. High resolution (for example a Pixel Qi transreflective – colour with the backlight on and high-res monochrome in daylight) would make the small screen work perfectly for ebooks, reading and annotating papers, viewing and manipulating media.

The hardback takes a little more effort: I have to make room for it in the bag. But it might be worth it if I’m planing to do any writing; a hardback is just wide enough for a full-size on-screen keyboard. At least it fits a four-row keyboard with tabs, brackets, punctuation and numbers split off into separate modes like, say, the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard.

Existing tablet computers try to be laptop replacements, which makes them far too bulky and heavy. Here, less is more. Optical drives, hard disks, ports – all these could be left out. A lightweight, power-efficient touch-optimised operating system would help – which of course just reminds me of the iPhone again.

The technology to make a really good dynabook is here now, and these form factors have been waiting to return to us. I think this design is inevitable. Jonathan Ive seems pretty good at bringing this kind of thing into the world, but one way or another it’s coming. We’ll have a new kind of computer which will support new uses, and I’m looking forward to trying one out.

And sometimes the official channels do fail. For example, our emergency dispatch services in Australia rely on automated systems that demand a street address. In situations where that’s not available the system can break down, as it did for David Iredale, who called 000 seven times when lost in the Blue Mountains in December 2006, and clearly explained that he was on the “Mt Solitary walking track heading towards the Kedumba River”, but tragically died after being dismissed by operators because he could not provide a street address.

Street addresses are not a perfect system; friends can work around that but centralised institutions have trouble with it. I once lived on Sutherland Avenue, one block down from Sutherland Street and not very well signposted. Taxis would ignore the instruction to come to “Sutherland Avenue, NOT SUTHERLAND STREET” every. single. time. And yes, ambulances too.

In extremis I’d want my friends to know I needed help, not just an “ambulance triple-0 centre [...] hopelessly inflexible and staffed by civilians forced to work 12-hour shifts without sufficient breaks“. The emergency services do save a lot of people, and clearly they’re working very hard to do so. However it seems this is in spite of inefficient systems, rather than because of efficient ones.

And sometimes, in some places calling the emergency services isn’t an option. As for James Buck, whose single-word tweet of “Arrested” alerted his network of friends to spring him from political arrest in Egypt. We are lucky in Australia to have our police working for us, at least most of the time.

So let’s not decry the fact that these girls reached out to their connected community directly for help, instead of thinking first of the crucial but overburdened and overcentralised triple-0 service. Let’s recognise that new ways of doing things have their own strengths, and that hyperconnected ten and twelve-year-olds might have something to teach us.

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.

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.