March 20, 2005
OPINION://Feeling your presence
Over at we make money not art I saw an article on these wonderful chairs. They are designed for indoor public places, and are made from translucent plastic. Embedded sensors can tell if someone is sitting on them. Each chair has lighting that can vary in intensity and colour, and also can pulse. A central unit controls the whole show according to who sits where and for how long.
What excites me about this is that it is a great example of what you might call “Galbian presence”. Anyone who has read Douglas Galbi’s awesome treatise on the history of presence will immediately see the sensuousness of these “presence chairs”. Galbi rightly pulls out examples of sensuous communication from history such as religious manuscripts. Part of “presence” is that tingle you get when you actually see — in real life — Stonehenge, the Book of Kells, or the Declaration of Independence.
It is very easy when talking about presence to get sucked into thinking about IM icons, and the messaging of comings and going using protocols like SIMPLE. But go take a look at the work of Media Lab Europe in Dublin. They have flower pots that bloom according to the availability of your special other. Tables that remember what was on them. Then there are the haptic (touchy feely) instant messages, the time-smeared entrance lobby webcam, and so on. Presence isn’t just about smiley icons.
Now I’m a consultant again, I can’t resist the urge to map these onto a 2×2 grid. Along the bottom I’d put Galbi’s “sensuousness”. On the vertial, I’d put — for want of a better term — “continuity”. By that I mean “that which connects the past, present and future”.
So the flower pot is quite sensuous, but doesn’t offer much continuity; it only shows present state. The glowing chairs are both sensuous and continuous. The visual history will even influence where people sit in future.
A standard IM client presence icon isn’t very sensuous. But it is quite continuous; it doesn’t just tell you whether someone is there now, but also suggests whether you’ll be able to talk to them in the near future. It doesn’t tell you, though, if they’re available often. That would be better represented as sparklines.
Whether you’re available in the future is often encoded in your calendar. Microsoft really get presence, IMHO, and are integrating all the pieces very nicely in their new collaboration tools and mobile offerings. If they end up owning the world (again), it’s because the competition got lost trying to emulate the PSTN on IP.
Emoticons are a means of making chat more sensuous. The voice quality of Skype talk, however, is very sensuous over a good connection. It is also continuous; you can simply talk about the past and future.
As I noted before, the missed calls list in your mobile or Skype client is a form of anti-presence, because you weren’t there. But we can work to make it all a lot better. Just because someone called doesn’t mean they will want to talk to you. It could just be a wrong number! What if you could end your attempted call in two ways? Press the red phone button for “terminate with prejudice” — this call is dead; press the green phone button for “let’s parlez” — sorry I missed you, please call back. It’s the circuit-switched mindset that stops us from going here; the idea that the end of the call is the end of the connection and terminates the conversation. The message isn’t “tear down circuit” any more, folks!
Even in Skype, there’s no real difference between “is there” presence and “wants to have a chat”. The Skype client could probably find out if you’re typing furiously, or click-dragging. It could find out what application has focus. These are indicators you’re involved in some task involving mental “flow”, like authoring, drawing or organising. You shouldn’t be interrupted. Whereas if you’re just reading and clicking links, it’s much less of an issue to have to pick up your thoughts. Why doesn’t Skype make an intelligent guess as to my status: “working”, “browsing”, “reading”, etc.?
The concepts of presence and absence have been great fodder for modern art. Today I was in the Dean Gallery with my daughter, admiring a Picasso-like abstract sculpture of a body, with the bits rearranged. Little madam was happily reeling off the names of the body parts, unperturbed by the unexpected absence of a torso. Artists have also long played off the notion of unexpectedly being there — think of the Warhol soup can, the Duchamp urinal. We haven’t yet got the message in our communications tools, though. If someone I know is always online, it’s not news she’s online right now. Tell me what’s unexpected! Who is around that’s hard to get hold of?
It somewhat reminds me of this classic Led Zeppelin album cover (for Presence, no less).
Inside, further characters from the 1940s and 50s festishise (in the designer’s words) an “obsessional object”, which is simultaneously present and absent:
I think you’re getting the idea:
(These are all scanned and reproduced without permission from The Work Of Hipgnosis - Walk Away Rene, so nah nah, sue me.)
Taking this as a cue, why not make “presence” and “absence” more explicit features of our messaging tools? For instance, you’re expected to make an effort to upload a picture of yourself into Skype. That’s presence. Why not get people to also upload a picture of the back of their head? That’s what you see for “absence”. Bob called, but you just missed him — look, there he is, going away.
These issues may seem trivial today, but imagine a world not so far away when you have thousands of contacts. Think of every company or person you’ve even called. Consider that most of those interactions weren’t one-off. How will we manage “presence” in this environment? How will you remain “in the presence of” former work colleagues? It’s a much bigger and richer problem than availability, contactability or address management.
If we’re going to make the public’s presence glands tingle, we’re going to have to do much better than the first generation of IP tools. Sensuous, continuous, inverted and unexpected. That’s the strange world of presence we need to urgently explore.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:11 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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A quibble regarding your remark about ending the call with a "note". Circuit switched network also need not have the problem you are alluding to. For example, narrowband ISDN has Cause codes in the clearing messages and they or user-to-user information filed could be used to convey additional information. (Enhanced clearing was one of the features proposed by some of the early "intelligence at the edge" proponents in ISDN.) In my opinion, the real problem is being stuck in "inband" signaling mindset (not circuit switched as you suggest) and not considering a richer user interface but sticking to 12+1 button user interface. By the way, narrowband ISDN also fell for this and so couldn't go beyond traditional telephony features. Full benefit of intelligence at the edge can be realized only if we allow for richer user interface to these devices.
Posted by: at March 21, 2005 01:02 PM