Recently in systems Category

On Wednesday night, I gave a talk at "The Influencers" lecture -- as part of the dotdotdot lecture series sponsored by the SVA's Interaction Design MFA program. I talked about Christopher Alexander -- how interaction designers and computer scientists love him but architects hate him. I also included some research I'm doing that links Alexander's early work to early artificial intelligence. My presentation is below, but the PDF version has my notes (you'll want them for the middle of the presentation, when I describe Notes on the Synthesis of Form & A Pattern Language).

Thank you so much to Liz Danzico, chair of the SVA's Interaction Design MFA and her team for inviting me, and the other excellent speakers: Allegra Burnette, Steven Heller and Jason Santa Maria for a stimulating and fun evening.

I'm in the midst of a bunch of intense writing on the origins of the pneumatic tube network. It's not done yet, but I'll share more here given the recent interest (thanks, Bruce, for the link!).

Introduced to combat the shortcomings of the telegraphic network in Paris, the subterranean Poste Pneumatique (Pneumatic Post) moved written telegraph messages from 1866 until 1984. The pneumatic tube network relieved the saturated telegraph network, delivering physical messages across the city and to the suburbs faster and more reliably than the telegraph. What first began as a one-kilometer line connecting Paris's stock exchange and central telegraph office opened to the public service in 1879, and by 1910 reached all arrondissements and nearby suburbs, contained 210 kilometers of underground tubes, and handled approximately nine million postal telegrams a year. By 1953 at its height, it was 450 km long--the largest in the world--processing more than 11 million pieces a year.

Why did it make sense to send a telegram via pneumatic tube? It was a set of factors related to urban conditions in the 19th century. Cities with high population, heavy commerce and finance and urban congestion made good candidates for pneumatic tube networks. Moreover, in Europe, the pneumatic tube mostly relieved a communication boom caused by inexpensive telegraphy and saturated telegraph networks. Devised as an auxiliary to the telegraph, a medium that could only transmit 40-50 messages of 20 words per hour in 1860, the pneumatic tube network addressed the issue of rapid, reliable communication within the city (though telegraphy still made sense for messages sent over longer distances).

Poste Pneumatique was under the operation of the telegraph office within the postal service, although it only moved physical, written cards and not electric messages. It offered Parisians a quick and reliable method of sending messages across their congested city--something that could not happen with overburdened telegraph lines or on urban streets. To send a "petit bleu," (the one on the right from this collection) as pneumatic messages were known, the sender composed a written message on a card and delivered it to a special Poste Pneumatique mailbox or the nearest post office. There, the postal telegraph desk delivered it via pneumatic tube receptacle to the addressee's closest post office, where a messenger (bicycle or later, motorcycle) would deliver it to the recipient--usually within two hours of its inscription.

By 1870, Paris also had an extensive network of vaulted sewers, built by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire. The sewers were a natural conduit for other types of infrastructure (potable water, telegraph lines, and eventually electricity), making it easier to install pneumatic tube and compressed air lines and to access them in case of error.

Paris's pneumatic tube network was not the first--that was London, started in 1853) and by no means was it the only one. Urban tube systems existed all over the world, in Europe, North and South America, and Australia. London invented its pneumatic post in 1853. Berlin began its Rohrpost in 1865 and Vienna in 1878 Philadelphia followed suit for first class post in 1893 and New York in 1897. The technology transferred readily and with less competition than might have been expected (Austrian, German and French engineers shared technological improvements).

Urban tube networks existed for a surprisingly long time, remaining in operation until 1953 in New York, 1984 in Paris and 2002 in Prague (where it was only taken out of service by a flood that destroyed much of the tube infrastructure). They fell out of favor for different factors: in the US, the invention of the gasoline-powered truck in 1912 proved competitive; elsewhere, reliable telephone, and later fax service obviated the need for the networks. But still, telecommunication contends with issues of last mile delivery and economies of scale. And as interest in embedded computing grows, of objects imbued with interactivity, there's something extremely attractive about a physical system that shoots a physical message to its addressee.

(Update: if you're interested in pneumatic tubes, I've written more here.)

My big project -- possibly undergirding my dissertation in a year: Postal services and pneumatic tube systems in the late 19th and early 20th century, especially in Paris. I'm reading these services in terms of their urban interfaces, their material qualities and the interest in the 1870s-1890s of physical networks across cities. Paris is interesting because of an explosion of postal and telegraph products and services, the response to the siege of the city (Balloon Post!), and the shift from electric to material form to someone's doorstep in terms of message delivery. The Hôtel des Postes fascinates because of its ingenious interfaces within the building and its processing capability; the pneumatic tubes are fascinating because they make manifest the force of air and use it to literally propel information across a building or a city.

During the same four-year period when the word "interface" was first used, in which the notion of networks proliferated, Julien Guadet (1834-1908) designed the Hôtel des Postes (1880- 1884) in Paris, the central office for the French postal network. An enormous civic architectural undertaking, the Hôtel des Postes sorted, moved, marked, placed in sacks, audited, loaded and transported letters, periodicals and packets at high speeds, before sending them out again to their destinations. For Guadet and bureaucratic chronicler of Paris Maxime Du Camp, La Poste represented a living system that they described in anthropomorphic terms. Guadet described the postal system as epileptically fast; du Camp compared it to a heart that "draws in its correspondence and forces it back out to distribute in every direction." Beyond these biological comparisons, however, Guadet designed the Hôtel des Postes to operate as an ordinateur--a computer processor--atop the postal network. The Hôtel des Postes represents a nascent, modern approach to designing buildings, one that translated organizational, functional requirements into form.


Fueling communication through pipes that ran under cities at speeds of up to 50 km per hour, the pneumatic post served as an urban subterranean communication network from the 1850s into the early 21st century, first in Europe, then the United States, and by the early 20th century, South America and Australia. Depending on the city, pneumatic tubes shuttled telegrams or letters and packages, both commercial and personal, as an antidote to increasing urban congestion and traffic on the streets above. Messages delivered by pneumatic dispatch surfaced in post offices and train stations, where messengers carried them by bicycle (or later, motorcycle or truck) from the post or telegraph branch to their final destinations.   For commercial buildings, pneumatic tubes offered ready communication systems between and within any enterprises that required the movement of receipts and paper. At once buried and tangled, emerging into the interiors of buildings and offering varied interfaces for its users, the pneumatic tube presents an enigmatic image of modernity--the merger of construction and communication.

Pneumatic networks preceded electrification, first powered by steam and only by electricity in the early 20th century. They enjoyed a long lifespan. Implemented first in London in 1853 as an information conduit between the London Stock Exchange and the Central Post Office, the technology quickly transferred to other cities. Berlin began its Rohrpost in 1865; Paris built its first pneumatic networks in 1866 and began public Poste Pneumatique in 1879; Philadelphia followed suit for first class post in 1893 and New York in 1897. Urban tube networks existed for a surprisingly long time, remaining in operation until 1953 in New York, 1984 in Paris and 2002 in Prague (where it was only taken out of service by a flood that destroyed much of the tube infrastructure).

I must admit, I'm surprised to find myself heading toward a 19th century dissertation topic, and at that, one that deals with France. But working on tubes and postal services lets me explore the things that I love about tangible networks and interfaces. They make me realize just how much we have to learn from these old and often forgotten modes of transmission.

It struck me I've not posted the talk I gave at IxDA's Interaction 08 conference, titled Strategic Boredom. Some of what I had to say I'd published in an earlier blog post. Here, you can see the video.

Boredom is a provocation. But what kind of provocation is it?

It is not the existential state of eternal ennui or depression-- if it were, it would act like the dejected robot Marvin in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It means more than just the impetus for change. The Morrisseys and of the world capture the drudgery of it. Here's what Siegfried Kracauer wrote about it in "Boredom:"

But although one wants to do nothing, things are done to one: the world makes sure that one does not find oneself. And even if one perhaps isn't interested in it, the world itself is much too interested for one to find the peace and quiet necessary to be as thoroughly bored with the world as it ultimately deserves.

Boredom's definitions over the last 2000 years include acedia, dejection, depression, sloth, laziness, immobility. We characterize it in the same manner as melancholia, tristesse, ennui, annoyance and wearisomeness. La Rochfoucauld wrote, "l'extrême ennui sert à nous désennuyer" (extreme boredom serves to distract from boredom). Séan Healy notes the paradox, asking, "How could an extreme form of something distract one form a lesser form of the same affliction?" In English, Byron first noted bores (someone suffering from ennui) in Don Juan, where he wrote, "Society is now one polished horde, Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored." Charles Dickens invoked boredom in his 1852 novel Bleak House, after which Healy distinguishes British boredom from the continental form: sullen and private as opposed to continental boredom's virulence and destruction.

It has its own typology: situative boredom (waiting for someone or taking a train), the boredom of satiety (too much of the same thing), existential boredom and creative boredom (in which someone is forced to do something new or different). Situative boredom, the momentary ennui presented by a certain state of things, can be shaken off by action. Lars Svendsen writes, "To the extent that there is a clear form of expression for profound boredom, it is via behaviour that is radical and breaks new ground, negatively indicating boredom as its prerequisite." He notes the example of Alberto Moravia's novel, La Noia, in which the narrator's father's boredom "that does not require anything else to be assuaged than new, unusual experiences."

Søren Kierkegaard, tongue firmly-in-cheek in that very Danish way, analyzed the genesis of boredom and its effect throughout history. He presupposes boredom as the root of all evil, "ruinous" for man: "The effect that boredom exercises is altogether magical, except that it is not one of attraction but of repulsion." The impetus to build grows out of this boredom: humanity grows so bored, it builds a boring tower.

We can trace this from the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, so Eve was created. From that time boredom entered the world and grew in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored in union, then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille, then the population increased and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of building a tower so high it reached the sky. The very idea is as boring as the tower was high, and a terrible proof of how boredom had gained the upper hand. Then the nations scattered over the earth, just as people now travel abroad, but they continued to be bored. And think of the consequences of this boredom! Man stood high and fell low, first with Eve and then the Tower of Babel. Yet what was it that stayed the fall of Rome? It was panis and circenses.

Martin Heidegger continues along the path of Kierkegaard's existential dissection of boredom. He studies boredom in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics as part of his continual exploration of Dasein (existence). He directly relates boredom to the passage of time, for in German, the word for boredom is Langeweil, literally "to have long time." Heidegger derives his consideration of it from the notion of a "profound boredom;" its relation to time is key. Boredom leads to time, time leads to boredom. Within such a frame, boredom is the "fundamental attunement" and at that, an objective and subjective hybrid. It is a tricky concept since "we do not understand boredom in its essence," writes Heidegger, perhaps because it has never become essential to us. "Perhaps that very boredom which often merely flashes past us, as it were, is more essential than that boredom with which we are explicitly concerned whenever this or that particular thing bores us by making us feel ill at ease." He suggests not going out of one's way to make oneself bored, but rather learn "not to resist straightaway but to let resonate... only by not being opposed to it, but letting it approach us and tell us what it wants, what is going on with it."

Boredom is not only time's passage but an ideological reception. It converges with conceptual art in Brian O'Doherty's 1967 Object and Idea in his characterization of "high-boredom and low-boredom art." High-boredom art relies heavily on exhaustible optical effect, such as with op and Pop art. Low boredom art, the realm of artists like Donald Judd and Robert Smithson, does not force itself onto viewers and outside of the gallery. In fact, the sculptor and critic (a.k.a sculptor Patrick Ireland) writes, "It tends to fade into the environment with a modesty so extreme that it is hard not to read it as ostentatious." Though he notes that the distinctions of boredom may sound arbitrary, they are useful because they uncover some of the main concerns in art of the sixties, "to the ironies they conceal, to the techniques which they are executed ... and to the 'mimicking' of the machine, which in the last few years has constituted a new orthodoxy of unfreedom and freedom." Computers don't help, either, for machines reduce the role of chance as a "built-in variable to the most sophisticated--and literally most stupid--of machines, the computer."

It is, however, a provocation. It needn't just be the state of things changing. Cyberneticist Gordon Pask invoked boredom routines when he created the Musicolour Machine in 1953. It was a machine that accompanied live music with improvised light shows. When the musicians became too repetitive, the machine would get bored and stop responding, requiring the musicians to change what they were doing in order to reengage the Musicolour Machine. (Would that I had a copy of Cybernetic Serendipity at my disposal: I would post some of the images of it.)

 The idea reappears in Cedric Price's Generator (1976-79, not built). This series of cubes, walkways and catwalks could be moved around by a mobile crane on the site. Price's collaborator John Frazer, proposed that the cubes be outfitted with sensors that would report on the use of the components. If the pieces of Generator weren't moved enough, they would grow bored and design their own layouts, which in turn would be handed off to the mobile crane operator to put into place.

The very least you would expect of a system, wrote John Frazer, is that if you kick it, it should kick back. In Generator, Frazer found the germ of an idea that would shift his concepts of computer-aided design toward one where the computer took an active, not a passive role. Here, boredom serves a challenge to use systems differently, to try something different. He was so committed to the sensors and boredom routines of Generator that he continued to pursue aspects of the project in 1989, 1995 and ultimately shortly before Price's death in 2003.
 

Anne Galloway writes in favour of boredom, in terms of it being a slow space for contemplation, against commodification. There is a panoply of possibility for boredom, too, as a button pushing, frustrating, provocation: an itchiness.

Not much has been published about Cedric Price's Generator project. In fact, not much at all has been published about (or by) Price (1934-2003), an architect who understood architecture as that which set the conditions for interaction, as opposed to imposing formal will on a place. He was famous for statements like, "Technology is the answer... but what was the question?" and for suggesting that architecture might not be the right solution to a problem (maybe you don't need a new house. Maybe you need to leave your wife, he suggested). He is best known for two unbuilt projects: the Fun Palace (1963-67), a collaboration with radical theater director Joan Littlewood, and the Potteries Thinkbelt, a mobile university on rails (1965).  Though he avoided personal technology in his office--the fax didn't have paper; the phone was only answered during strict hours--his ideas presaged concepts we're familiar with today, including the Internet and ubiquitous computing.

Generator (1976-79, unbuilt), sought to create conditions for shifting, changing personal interaction in a reconfigurable and responsive architectural project. It was to serve as a retreat and activity center for small groups of visitors (1 to 100) to the White Oak Plantation on the coastal Georgia-Florida border. Designed for Howard Gilman, the CEO of the Gilman Paper Company and a generous arts patron [1], it followed this open-ended brief:

A building which will not contradict, but enhance, the feeling of being in the middle of nowhere; has to be accessible to the public as well as to private guests; has to create a feeling of seclusion conducive to creative impulses, yet ... accommodate audiences; has to respect the wildness of the environment while accommodating a grand piano; has to respect the continuity of the history of the place while being innovative.[2]

Price developed a scheme of 150 12' by 12' recombinable, mobile cubes with off-the-shelf infill panels, glazing and sliding glass doors; catwalks; screens and boardwalks, all of which could be moved by mobile crane as desired by users to support whatever activities they had in mind, whether public or private, serious or banal.

In order to determine the initial arrangements--menus, as he called them--Price used programmatic research tools: activity questionnaires filled out by Generator's potential users, who then mapped these against requirements for infrastructure, space, quiet or privacy. He used the small, handheld Three Peg Game to determine the original layout for Generator. 
Its rules were simple: take turns with the other player in forming a line of three same-colored pegs (a "mill"), whether vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. The winner is declared when the opponent cannot make a move. "It is usual to play a series of games until one player has a two game lead when he is considered to have won outright," the rules note. From here, in combination with the programmatic exercises, he created what he called menus: arrangements of Generator's cubes, screens and paths that would engage people in unexpected interactions with each other and with Generator as they used it.



Price was particularly interested in the idea that Generator would surprise its users (or for that matter, at least himself). In collaboration with programmer-architects John and Julia Frazer, Generator became "intelligent" with the addition of computer programs and embedded sensors. Each element of Generator would be outfitted with an independent microchip. The sensors would interact with four computer programs that performed a variety of tasks, including keeping inventory, aiding Generator's users to design different layouts, and most powerfully and importantly, getting bored. The boredom routine would run if people did not request changes of Generator frequently enough, or if the parts were not aptly used. It would draw up new plans for Generator, which would be handed off to the social elements of the project.

The social elements of Generator acknowledged that a retreat site composed of mobile, responsive components would prove unfamiliar to visitors without human facilitation. Thus, Price created two roles, "Polariser" and "Factor," to catalyze on-site interpersonal dynamics and logistical requirements. Polariser would encourage people to use Generator in novel ways and facilitate their interactions with each other; Factor would operationalize the desires of Generator's users onsite, operating the mobile crane to suit the menu and handling other human to site requirements. Polariser was Barbara Jakobson, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and the person who introduced Price to Gilman. Factor was Wally Prince, the operations manager for the White Oak Plantation.

Like many of Price's projects, Generator was never built. After nearly three years of design, the project was stymied by financial turmoil and a feud within the family-run Gilman Paper Company. Moreover, inasmuch as the project served to benefit employees of the company, the workforce did not support the project: the maintenance requirements were too great. Gilman was unable to clear the hurdle and had to abandon the project. John Frazer continued to hope that the project would be revived, suggesting a new start in 1989, again in 1995, and shortly before Price's death in 2003.

Technologically speaking, it must be said that Generator was a notably prescient project. It represents the nexus of architecture and nascent ubiquitous computing. The technical ideas behind Price and the Frazers' collaboration on Generator have still not been largely realized. Yet all of the groundwork was in place for Generator--its flexible program and its elements--before the sensors and programs were ever discussed. The programs were useful for the ways they could unleash unexpected interactions, but without the investigations into the connection of the social and the site and the underlying concepts, the idea would not have endured--an important precept for designers and architects working at the intersection of pervasive computing and design.