Institute For The Future

Yes-and in post-cyberspace design

You never know what will serve as the source for some illuminating (or at least entertaining) metaphor. For example, Stephen Colbert's graduation speech has made me think about one aspect of technologies and the future of cyberspace.

Colbert recently gave a commencement address at Knox College, and in the serious part of it, drew a parallel between post-graduation life and improvisational comedy:

 

When I was starting out in Chicago, doing improvisational theatre with Second City and other places, there was really only one rule I was taught about improv. That was, "yes-and." In this case, "yes-and" is a verb.... [Y]es-anding means that when you go onstage to improvise a scene with no script, you have no idea what’s going to happen, maybe with someone you’ve never met before. To build a scene, you have to accept. To build anything onstage, you have to accept what the other improviser initiates on stage. They say you’re doctors—you’re doctors. And then, you add to that: We’re doctors and we’re trapped in an ice cave. That’s the "-and." And then hopefully they "yes-and" you back. You have to keep your eyes open when you do this. You have to be aware of what the other performer is offering you, so that you can agree and add to it. And through these agreements, you can improvise a scene or a one-act play. And because, by following each other’s lead, neither of you are really in control. It’s more of a mutual discovery than a solo adventure....

Well, you are about to start the greatest improvisation of all. With no script. No idea what’s going to happen, often with people and places you have never seen before. And you are not in control. So say "yes." And if you’re lucky, you’ll find people who will say "yes" back.

 

Okay, nice enough for a graduation speech. But it strikes me that "yes-and" serves as a good shorthand for thinking about one of the opportunities that ubiquitous computing technologies create.

Cyberspace had an important either/or: most of the time, you could either interact with it, or with the world, but not both at once. The personal computing model of interacting with information was socially disruptive: the keyboard and monitor require a lot of your attention. Under most circumstances, this meant choosing between things seen through a screen on your desk, or the world around your desk. To put it another way, the same technologies that made it easy for you to interact in real time with someone thousands of miles away made it hard to interaction with someone a few feet away.

What ubicomp offers is the possibility of creating devices, spaces, and interactions that don't force an either/or choice upon their users, but rather explore the opportunities and exploit the synergies of a yes-and: combining the affordances of physical media, the familiarity of traditional workspaces, or the complexity and richness of social settings, with the speed and flexibility of bits. Some examples:

• E-paper that looks and feels like traditional paper, but can be updated much more easily.
• Devices like the Ambient Orb that can communicate information while staying at the edges of your attention, not forcing their way into the center.
• Tags: VERB Yellowball uses an ID to connect the ball to a digitally-managed story about it; Semapedia is a physical wiki, a framework to "connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the best information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space;" Thinglink is a system for generating ID numbers for craft goods, which also serve as pointers to database records about those objects-- a bit like blogjects, a bit like MARC records.

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