Specs Focus: Mobile interaction design; emergent user innovation

Base: Computational Foundry, Swansea University, U.K.

of our overreliance on, and almost worship of, faulty world models running in the cloud, parallel to the real one on the ground.

Bridle gives sobering accounts of how this dependence can have serious practical implications when these models fail (and if you are into design-motivating cyber-apoca-lit, then a book I’m listening to by Bill Clinton and James Patterson, The President is Missing, will appeal). More profoundly, he asks us to wake up to the dangers of solutionism, which sees computing as a way of smoothing all trouble, removing all obstacles, tidying away the mess.

The book is a call not to
reject progress but rather
to think hard about it. So,
reconsidering the positive
I love books. I have a stack
by my bedside, a Kindle, and
a subscription to Audible.
I have the e-book and
audiobook versions of some
of my hard-copy books, but it
is to this bedside pile and to
the pleasure of the physical
that I am drawn. For years in
my own research I’ve thought
about printed, bound books
as a guiding design ideal
physically become part
of as you hold the book,
feel its weight, bury your
nose in it, and leaf through
its pages. This is a very
different sensation from the
weightlessness of a digital
experience, the poking
or sliding of a finger on
touchscreen glass that leaves
me feeling like an outsider,
face pressed up against
the window, staring in at
something other.

My unease at what digital
technology is doing to the
perception and practice of
who we are as humans—our
embodied nature—has
been exacerbated by reading
James Bridle’s New Dark
Age: Technology and the End
of the Future. In it, he warns
for the sorts of laid-back,
unobtrusive, quiet, and calm
mobile devices and services
that I think are important,
and increasingly so.

Open a book and immediately you enter a world that engages your creativity and imagination, one that engenders a persistent, sustained experience that you

Matt Jones
Bridle warns of
our overreliance
on, and almost
worship of, faulty
world models
running in the
cloud, parallel to
the real one on
the ground.

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