This was a session by Matt Jones (Dopplr) and Tom Coates (Yahoo! Brickhouse / fire eagle) on the past, present, and future of “data portability” and other ways in which users experience and give access to their personal data. They discussed a lot of interesting design patterns that are fundamental to our current phase of innovation. These are interactions and metaphors that don’t always come to mind when people think of the superficial aspects of Web 2.0. Rough notes after the jump.

Polite, Pertinent, and… Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics
Design and User Experience 2006 Wed 9:40 AM
Matt Jones (Dopplr), Tom Coates (Yahoo! Brickhouse / fire eagle)

Introduction

How is personal information from the cloud surfaced to you, and from you back out to various services? Examples:

• skydeck, for phone bills
• Mint, for financial info
• didn’t mention iTripit, for travel data (Dopplr is in the same space, methinks)

Everyware (Adam Greenfield) gets mentioned; part of that idea is that personal data will have its own software, surfaced from the larger scopes of software and shared with those larger domains.

Politeness

Why “Politeness”? Instead of saying “privacy” which is generally thought of in software security terms, these guys wanted to take a different tact. The software that manages your personal data must work in terms of social mores and human expectations. See also:

• Mimi Ito (”Full-Time Intimate Community”)
• Leisa Reichert (”Ambient Intimacy”)
• Matthew Chalmers (”Beautiful Seams”): Liminal spaces shouldn’t necessarily be effortless; they should instead be comprehensible and beautiful. Demo of Dopplr’s API sharing with Fire Eagle is given. Flickr API keys are similar, but this is finer-grained (”my exact location” vs. “my current city”)
• Anne Galloway (”The Forgetting Machine”): Forgetting as an important aspect of software. Software services should forget information as time passes, or at least when you ask them to. E.g. “Dead man’s switch” for confirmation emails in fire eagle; the default for no response is to turn off a service.

Another example: Dopplr, when closing your account, deletes all of your information and gives you a .zip file of everything it had.

Pertinence

Models of the Web

• Initially, Physicality (visiting a site)
• Then, Prosthesis (helping you complete a task, do stuff)
• Now, Movement (flows of information, metabolic processes, information surfaced only when needed.)

On this last point, for example, Dopplr is wondering if one can build a “web site that you never go to.” That is, a pure service that only brings itself to your attention when absolutely necessary.

Prettiness

Making the invisible visible. Visual exxamples:

• 4d photographs, representing motion
• Time-slice visualizations of Wikipedia edit wars
• Laser projections on exhaust plume in Helsinki as visualization of pollution

Dopplr, for example, is giving its users a view of the carbon footprint of their travel. Right now it’s the “scale, not a diet” but they are aware that a simple visualization (e.g. Prius dashboard) can modify behavior. Games are almost purely this.

An aside on design thinking: Sweat the details, because these are the things that are hard to replicated, not broad feature sets.

Future

The “Participatory Panopticon.” (Hopefully we can cross over from the scary to the truly useful.)

• GPS + Galvanic sensors, letting people visualize their stress points as they move around a civic space
• 23 in me: Full, voluntary genetic screening
• MIT’s Reality Mining, tracking location over time using mobile phone signals
• City of Sound as urban informatics, where we can visualize the behavior of those around us (how wasteful is my neighbor?)
• POO (Post-optimal objects): pills that track your digestive tract and make music from it.

Related Posts:

• OpenEMR and OpenMRS (September, 2007)
• “A Group is its Own Worst Enemy” (November, 2008)
• Web2.0 Notes: Designing APIs (April, 2008)
• Analytics 2.0 (April, 2007)
• Empirical Design Using Analytics (April, 2007)

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