Physical Computing

Introduction: Why are we here again?

Why Data?

The word data gets thrown around a lot, so to start out, let's give it a provisional definition. Nathan Shedroff has a good beginning: he calls information "the raw material we find or create that we use to build our communications." Data about a given situation is an expression of some of the properties of the situation, usually in some quantitative form. It may be resource consumption measured over time, population shifts in a given area, visitor traffic to a venue, and so forth. Unless it's related to our experience in some way, though, data has little meaning for us.

To give it meaning, we organize data, looking for patterns that we can draw from it. We draw connections between patterns of data and personal experience, we scale the results of our data gathering to show patterns that people can understand and extrapolate on, and we represent it in a form that's digestible for our audience. When we organize data in this way, it becomes information.

Why Sculpting?

These notes owe heavily to Nathan Shedroff's essay, "Information Interaction Design", in Information Design, 1st edition, Robert Jacobson, ed. ©MIT Press 2000

Information design is a relatively new profession (or a new name for an old practice), and the people who do it relate it to many different existing practices in order to make sense of what they're doing. "Information architecture" is a common term these days, linking the practice of organizing information to the practice of organizing space. It's not a bad way of thinking about it. Data often has several dimensions to consider; space has three. Architects (the kind who build buildings) feel that they are also organizing our experience of space, so they throw in the fourth dimension of time. Both the practice of organizing data and the practice of organizing buildings, then, involve managing multidimensional relationships.

Architecture has some weighty connotations. It's often thought of as one of our most "important" professions, the ones conservative parents want their kids to join as adults. Buildings endure the test of time, they are not ephemeral, like data in a database. They form the infrastructure of our society. They are hard, solid, things to which people have a definite physical relationship. Given this, it's easy to see why people who deal with organizing information like to be associated with architects. Information is ephemeral, not something you can touch or feel, like a building. But we relate to it best when we have some sort of mental structure for it. So why not call ourselves architects of information? We have to build these structures, after all, and relating ourselves to the people who build buildings makes us feel more important about our work.

Richard Saul Wurman is credited with coining the term "Information Architect", and his books, including Information Anxiety, are some of the germinal texts of the field. Read his work if you're interested in information architecture at all.

Shedroff's description of data as a raw material brings to mind another practice that I think is worth considering: sculpture. Traditionally, sculptors start with some raw material, and work that material into a form that expresses something of their point of view. The raw material is still there, but there is no doubt about the fact that the sculptor has made a mark on it. I think this idea is very important when we think about what we do to data. We organize it to express our point of view. Sometimes that's difficult to do, because no matter how we look at it, the data won't fit our expectations. This is not a new experience to the sculptor either. Sometimes, no matter how much you want the material to take a particular shape, it just won't bend to your will. At that point, you either have to give up and make something else of it, or choose a new material to work with. In practice, sculpture and information design have this in common: the raw materials don't always cooperate, and sometimes they surprise you. And no matter how much you may think that "the work speaks for itself", you're always speaking through it.

There's another way in which sculpture and information design are similar. In both fields, you have to contend with the fact that the results of your work can be looked at from several different angles. As a sculptor, you can position the work against a wall, or in a corner, but there will still be someone who crawls behind it to look at it from behind. As an information designer, there will always be someone who offers a different spin on the data. If you've done a thorough job, you've taken those multiple perspectives into account, and made a work that is engaging from any angle.

Why take this literally?

In the sculpting with data class, we're going to take this relationship between sculpture and information design literally. We're going to use data as one of our raw materials, and we're going to incorporate it into sculptures. It may seem like a good way to ruin a good metaphor, but I think there is value to the exercise.

First, there is a practical benefit. Most of the people entering this class are quite adept at designing information on a computer screen. Even before you start designing for the screen, you get used to thinking of information organized for the screen. Just because we all watch CNN, MTV, shop through amazon.com and search using google.com, we've developed pretty sophisticated eyes for screen-based information design. In this class, all of our projects will be based in some medium other than the screen. We won't use it at all. By limiting ourselves this way, we'll have to focus our attention on the other ways that we represent information and take in information. Hopefully we'll sharpen our design skills by adding some new media to our toolbox.

For a great description of the relationship between data organization and sculpture, see Shedroff's description of Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial (in Jacobson, Information Design, pp. 277-278).

"Information sculptures" if we want to call them that, are nothing new. There are many elements of our everyday world that abstract information into a sculptural form. The most obvious example is the analog clock. It represents the passage of time to us as motion. It's a great metaphor, one so rich that we've almost forgotten it is a metaphor. Time isn't really circular, or even cyclical, and certainly it doesn't move in a straight, regular line. Think about experiences like déja vù, or the stretching of time in a traumatic experience and you'll see what I mean. But in everyday experience, so many events repeat cyclically that the circular clock just makes sense as a way to mark the passage of time. The clock gives us data about time in an abstract form, and it becomes information because it's organized in a familiar form (the clock face) that we've all learned to read, and to relate to our everyday experience. Just by seeing two hands of a clock in a particular orientation, we can conjure up all kinds of associations: the spookiness of midnight, the relief of quitting time, and so forth. This use of abstract shapes and motion has become the main representation of time in western culture. The combination has inspired generations of sculptors and mechanists. Browse any book or website on horology and you'll find numerous creative interpretations of the clock.

Robert Levine's A Geography of Time is an excellent examination of how we perceive time, and how different cultures perceive it differently, for those who are interested in time.

Many data sculptures tend to represent information about the physical world, like the clock does: barometers, orreries, and weather vanes spring immediately to mind next. These have all developed for practical reasons, but there is no reason that data sculptures can't be purely expressive as well. In recent years, many information technology researchers and artists have made data sculptures relating to network traffic, weather, political relations, body relations, and much more.

Why networks?

The final parameter of work in this class is that projects will involve a network in some way or another. For better or for worse, we live in a time when networks are central to so much of what we do and how we live. The rise of the internet in popular awareness brings this fact home to us all. From the internet to our network of business associates to the network of devices in our homes, most things are connected in some way or another. It's becoming increasingly difficult for anything or anyone to stand alone. Networks can lead to interesting patterns of behavior not possible below a certain critical mass of individuals. By making networks a part of our work -- networks of sensors or processors, connections to the internet, or networks of output devices -- we'll hopefully get a chance to explore some of those patterns.

Conclusion

We often overlook the physical forms which we use to convey information. As representation on screen gets richer and more subtle, and as sound reproduction gets better, the physical objects that do the work of that reproduction get more and more invisible to us. We forget that the screen is encased in an ugly beige box, or that the speakers are in cubes taking up shelf space. It's my hope that looking at information design in this way -- representing its changes and relationships by using the relationships between physical objects themselves -- will give us new ways of looking at how we go about working with data. The process of having to put those objects together and build and direct the relationships between them will hopefully give us a further appreciation for the relationships we are using them to represent. Data, like physical materials, doesn't always do what we want it to do, and sometimes the surprises it gives us are more valuable than what had expected.

For an overview of artwork intersecting with information design, see Stephen Wilson's Information Arts. book and website.

Clay Shirky's course, Thinking about Networks, has had an influence on my thinking in this area, as has Steven Johnson's book Emergence.