Interactions - November/December 2012

RON WAKKARY ERIK STOLTERMAN

If You Choose to Pay Attention

We are pleased to have Malcolm McCullough grace the pages of interactions for our cover story this issue. His work has explored the intersections of people, technology, and interaction in one form or another for some time. The insightfulness of his books Digital Ground (2004) and Abstracting Craft (1996) presaged many issues that we continue to wrestle with in dealing with the complexities and challenges of making and working with digital materials. With a background in architecture, McCullough has grounded his ideas in the confounding actuali-ties of place. This position affords a view that is a critical counterbalance to disembodied and dislocated understandings of interactive technology and its effects.

McCullough’s article, “On
Attention to Surroundings,” is
based on his forthcoming book

Ambient Commons—Attention in the
Age of Embodied Information (MIT
Press). As a theorist who pays
attention to the bigger questions,
McCullough rethinks ambient and
embodied information, bringing
attention to the role of designing
technology to help us tune in to
vital places like our civic spaces
and commons. His article aims to
reshape our notions of attention.
He understands our current pleth-
ora of information as an embodied
media that we inhabit as much as
if not more than simply perceive
or process mentally. No doubt this
raises issues of multitasking, con-
text, and cognitive capacity. Yet
McCullough asks us to consider
newer notions, such as the idea
that ambient information puts
us in an age of superabundance, in
which the workings of attention may
be shifting. The issue for us, he
argues, is less a matter of over-
loading than of overconsumption.
The role that attention plays is
so vital that the author sees the
need to consider the responsibil-
ity of attentiveness and attention
practices.