MicroDesign.

A Conceptual Framework for Designing ‘Smart Applications’for the Emerging Ubiquituous Micromedia Environment.

Martin Lindner

Studio eLearning Environments

Abstract:

Institutionalized R&D dealing with ‘smart ICT’ has asevere problem, since the complete ecosystem is rapidly changingwith the converging Web 2.0: How can it stay one step ahead,considering the incredible fast ‘wild’ innovation cycle? Where arelonger-term needs that can be addressed by R&D in longer-term projects? This paper suggests that this may be the support of theChange Management needed to close the gap between the rapid evolution of web-based and mobile micromedia and the rather static patterns of behavior of mainstream users and organisations. This paper attempts a systematic description of the new mediaenvironment, building on a web-based discourse that itself has beentoo fast and distributed for peer-reviewed papers. It sketches out anumber of concepts, partly theoretical, partly phenomenological,that may contribute to a more complete understanding of theemerging digital ‘micromedia environments’ for which useful ‘smart ICT’ has to be designed. A fundamental change from softwaredevelopment and ‘usability’ approaches towards a holistic approachof “User Experience Design” is diagnosed. Some hints for the futuredesign of microinformation and microlearning applications arederived.

1Introduction: Smart Technologies, Smart Environments

1.1Smart Environments: Processing nit data but meanings

It is the mission of the ARC Research Studios Austria (RSA) to undertake cutting-edge,market-related research and development in the field of smart Information andCommunication Technologies. Lately, the “Web 2.0” (O’Reilly 2005)

wave of innovationis having a profound impact on the design of applications in that field, especially if theseare part of the daily digital media environment of human users. This impact can becharacterized as a change from traditional development of software ‘tools’ to the designof processes and experiences.The notion of ‘Smart ICT’ is quite vague, of course. Three basic layers or dimensions of ‘

smart environments

’ may be distinguished, depending on the semiotic level, at whichinteractions take place: (a) applications producing ‘intelligent behavior’ without

Web 2.0: Tim O’Reilly

conscious human interaction, like ‘smart clothing’ or ‘smart washing machines’; (b) the world of ‘pervasive computing’ as envisioned by Weiser (1991, 1994), mainly trying tocreate possibilities for more casual, but still conscious human interactions beyond thekeyboard/mouse/screen-scenario; (c) a level augmenting the world through additionaldigital semiotic layers, where interactions are de facto based on written language andgraphical sign systems (audio input/output plays a much less important role).

For this purposes, the term is used in the last sense: for applications and services actingon a ‘secondary level’ of information processing, dealing not just with data, but withcomplex

meanings

. Those applications can represent ‘smart environments’ inthemselves or, although restricted to very few functions, at the same time are acting as amodular, integral part of a bigger networked

‘smart environment’

in which again, as a whole, meanings are processed. This is the case with many lightweight applications(‘widgets’) that contribute to the overall experience of the “Web 2.0”.It was clear from the start that the desktop interface was not capable to really exploit the world-building possibilities of digital media. “The World is Not a Desktop”, said Weiser(1994). While he set up his project to re-build the physical world into a multiplecomputing interface beyond the restrictions of the screen, another visionary called for a“lifestreams” interface (Gelernter 2000).The Web 2.0, the term used here to include the phone-based Mobile Web 2.0(Jaokar/Fish 2006), is a world made of signs – in the first place, written-signs-on-screens. It is in the line of the visions of Weiser and Gelernter, but in an odd way –(relatively) low-tech, messy, emergent, driven not by macro-concepts, but by theunpredictable uses of people … As a second world, it is downright cultural, not aiming atan artificial ‘naturalness’ created/augmented by technology.So essentially the convergent Web 2.0 is a digital

media environment

, made fromsymbols, informations, and communications. It is semantic, but not in the sense of aconsistent, machine-readable Semantic Web. (For a more vision of a future semantic“Web 3.0” that is building on the microcontent-based Web 2.0, but involve back-end“machine-facilitated understanding of information”, see Spivack 2007.

)In the web-based digital environment that has evolved over the last five years or so,smart technologies are not located at the back-end, as in Pervasive Computing and in theSemantic Web. They are front-end, working at the Human-Computer Intersection, notthemselves creating meanings from data, but rather augmenting and further processinggiven meanings: by filtering, re-structuring, annotating, syndicating, aggregating,displaying them in new forms and ways. At the same time, Web 2.0 applications aremore and more especially designed to provoke users to supply and interconnect thesemeanings (‘user-generated content’) in an appropriate form to enable further processingand networking.

In a way this is the digital version of “Literary Technology”, which in Western Civilization is“continuously surrounding us at many scales” (Weiser 1994).

According to Spivack, Web 3.0 could be defined as “Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based servicesthat collectively comprise what might be called 'the intelligent Web'—such as those usingsemantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning,recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies—which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience."

All these characteristics might look no too spectacular for themselves, but takentogether, they change the whole scene of ICT and digital media. ‘Media’, as opposed to‘mediums’, is an immersive space. In such a context, software cannot be developedanymore to act as isolated ‘tools’ or ‘engines’ handling a special task. It has to bedesigned as integral part of the ‘Digital Lifestyle’ respectively the ‘Digital Workstyle’ (the boundary is blurring anyway).

1.2R&D in a Web 2.0 Environment

In the new ecosystem, adaptation and mutation happen within highly acceleratedinnovation cycles. This poses an important problem for R&D, as the traditional processof developing and building innovative software products in highly organized long-termprojects is less and less viable. Like Tim O’Reilly (2005) famously noted:

Users must be treated as co-developers,

in a reflection of open sourcedevelopment practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be releasedunder an open source license.) The open source dictum, “release early and releaseoften” in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, “the perpetual beta,” in which the product is developed in the open, with new featuresslipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.In typical academic or semi-academic R&D, it surely takes too much time to developsome complex software application. When such a product is ready (take for example anew e-learning platform) it tends to be obsolete already, as the digital environment haschanged dramatically in the meantime. Even worse, these changes cannot be anticipated. Although there is sure much room for improvement there, this is only in part a matter of better project planning or project management, or even a turn of the philosophy toward“Rapid Prototyping” or “Iterative Reframing”. At least when it comes to ICT that has tointegrate in the emerging web-based ecosystem, this is a structural problem. Even while being on the forefront of funded R&D, the Research Studios will have a very hard time tokeep pace with the overheated innovation cycles out there in the ‘wild wild Web’ basedon Open Source cultures and the creativity of small teams unhindered by organizationaloverheads.Therefore, in the field of e-learning, the strategy of the ARC Research Studio eLearningEnvironments should be to concentrate on a sort of

Change Management

to bridge adramatically increasing gap between the Web and the restricted and inflexible digital worlds of mainstream users. People and organizations are becoming increasingly out-of-cycle with the new emerging web-based ‘smart environments’. But in order to survive ina competitive global environment, fast adaptation is crucial. To facilitate this change, aspecial sort of ‘smart technologies’ is needed. Here may be a mission for R&D: to learnfrom the proliferation of new web applications and experiences, to analyze and totranslate them into coherent concepts acting as intermediaries between theorganizational culture and the new digital media culture.For successfully developing such adaptive solutions, it is most important to understandthe new relevance of design of processes and interfaces that came with the “Web 2.0”.This paper is an attempt to muster some ideas, concepts and metaphors (as ‘tools tothink’) that have surfaced in the highly fragmented and distibuted Web 2.0 designdiscourse, and build them into a (still provisory) conceptual framework for furtherdiscussion.