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MicroDesign.A Conceptual Framework for Designing Smart Applications

for the Emerging Ubiquituous Micromedia Environment.

Martin Lindner

Studio eLearning Environments

Abstract: Institutionalized R&D dealing with smart ICT has asevere problem, since the complete ecosystem is rapidly changingwith the converging Web 2.0: How can it stay one step ahead,considering the incredible fast wild innovation cycle? Where arelonger-term needs that can be addressed by R&D in longer-term

projects? This paper suggests that this may be the support of theChange Management needed to close the gap between the rapidevolution of web-based and mobile micromedia and the rather static

patterns of behavior of mainstream users and organisations. This paper attempts a systematic description of the new mediaenvironment, building on a web-based discourse that itself has beentoo fast and distributed for peer-reviewed papers. It sketches out anumber of concepts, partly theoretical, partly phenomenological,that may contribute to a more complete understanding of theemerging digital micromedia environments for which useful smart

ICT has to be designed. A fundamental change from softwaredevelopment and usability approaches towards a holistic approachof User Experience Design is diagnosed. Some hints for the future

design of microinformation and microlearning applications arederived.

1 Introduction: Smart Technologies, Smart Environments

1.1 Smart Environments: Processing nit data but meanings

It is the mission of the ARC Research Studios Austria (RSA) to undertake cutting-edge,market-related research and development in the field of smart Information andCommunication Technologies. Lately, the Web 2.0 (OReilly 2005)1 wave of innovation

is having a profound impact on the design of applications in that field, especially if theseare part of the daily digital media environment of human users. This impact can becharacterized as a change from traditional development of software tools to the designof processes and experiences.

The notion of Smart ICT is quite vague, of course. Three basic layers or dimensions ofsmart environments may be distinguished, depending on the semiotic level, at whichinteractions take place: (a) applications producing intelligent behavior without

1 Web 2.0: Tim OReilly

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conscious human interaction, like smart clothing or smart washing machines; (b) theworld of pervasive computing as envisioned by Weiser (1991, 1994), mainly trying tocreate possibilities for more casual, but still conscious human interactions beyond thekeyboard/mouse/screen-scenario; (c) a level augmenting the world through additionaldigital semiotic layers, where interactions are de facto based on written language andgraphical sign systems (audio input/output plays a much less important role).2

For this purposes, the term is used in the last sense: for applications and services actingon a secondary level of information processing, dealing not just with data, but withcomplex meanings. Those applications can represent smart environments inthemselves or, although restricted to very few functions, at the same time are acting as amodular, integral part of a bigger networked smart environmentin which again, as a

whole, meanings are processed. This is the case with many lightweight applications(widgets) that contribute to the overall experience of the Web 2.0.

It was clear from the start that the desktop interface was not capable to really exploit theworld-building possibilities of digital media. The World is Not a Desktop, said Weiser(1994). While he set up his project to re-build the physical world into a multiplecomputing interface beyond the restrictions of the screen, another visionary called for a

lifestreams interface (Gelernter 2000).

The Web 2.0, the term used here to include the phone-based Mobile Web 2.0(Jaokar/Fish 2006), is a world made of signs in the first place, written-signs-on-screens. It is in the line of the visions of Weiser and Gelernter, but in an odd way (relatively) low-tech, messy, emergent, driven not by macro-concepts, but by theunpredictable uses of people As a second world, it is downright cultural, not aiming atan artificial naturalness created/augmented by technology.

So essentially the convergent Web 2.0 is a digital media environment, made fromsymbols, informations, and communications. It is semantic, but not in the sense of aconsistent, machine-readable Semantic Web. (For a more vision of a future semanticWeb 3.0 that is building on the microcontent-based Web 2.0, but involve back-end

machine-facilitated understanding of information, see Spivack 2007.3

)

In the web-based digital environment that has evolved over the last five years or so,smart technologies are not located at the back-end, as in Pervasive Computing and in theSemantic Web. They are front-end, working at the Human-Computer Intersection, notthemselves creating meanings from data, but rather augmenting and further processinggiven meanings: by filtering, re-structuring, annotating, syndicating, aggregating,displaying them in new forms and ways. At the same time, Web 2.0 applications aremore and more especially designed to provoke users to supply and interconnect thesemeanings (user-generated content) in an appropriate form to enable further processingand networking.

2 In a way this is the digital version of Literary Technology, which in Western Civilization iscontinuously surrounding us at many scales (Weiser 1994).3 According to Spivack, Web 3.0 could be defined as Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoffof the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based servicesthat collectively comprise what might be called 'the intelligent Web'such as those usingsemantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning,recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologieswhich emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive userexperience."

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All these characteristics might look no too spectacular for themselves, but takentogether, they change the whole scene of ICT and digital media. Media, as opposed tomediums, is an immersive space. In such a context, software cannot be developedanymore to act as isolated tools or engines handling a special task. It has to bedesigned as integral part of the Digital Lifestyle respectively the Digital Workstyle (the

boundary is blurring anyway).

1.2 R&D in a Web 2.0 Environment

In the new ecosystem, adaptation and mutation happen within highly acceleratedinnovation cycles. This poses an important problem for R&D, as the traditional processof developing and building innovative software products in highly organized long-termprojects is less and less viable. Like Tim OReilly (2005) famously noted:

Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open sourcedevelopment practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be releasedunder an open source license.) The open source dictum, release early and releaseoften in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, the perpetual

beta, in which the product is developed in the open, with new featuresslipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.

In typical academic or semi-academic R&D, it surely takes too much time to developsome complex software application. When such a product is ready (take for example anew e-learning platform) it tends to be obsolete already, as the digital environment haschanged dramatically in the meantime. Even worse, these changes cannot be anticipated.

Although there is sure much room for improvement there, this is only in part a matter ofbetter project planning or project management, or even a turn of the philosophy towardRapid Prototyping or Iterative Reframing. At least when it comes to ICT that has tointegrate in the emerging web-based ecosystem, this is a structural problem. Even while

being on the forefront of funded R&D, the Research Studios will have a very hard time tokeep pace with the overheated innovation cycles out there in the wild wild Web basedon Open Source cultures and the creativity of small teams unhindered by organizationaloverheads.

Therefore, in the field of e-learning, the strategy of the ARC Research Studio eLearningEnvironments should be to concentrate on a sort ofChange Managementto bridge adramatically increasing gap between the Web and the restricted and inflexible digital

worlds of mainstream users. People and organizations are becoming increasingly out-of-cycle with the new emerging web-based smart environments. But in order to survive ina competitive global environment, fast adaptation is crucial. To facilitate this change, aspecial sort of smart technologies is needed. Here may be a mission for R&D: to learnfrom the proliferation of new web applications and experiences, to analyze and totranslate them into coherent concepts acting as intermediaries between the

organizational culture and the new digital media culture.For successfully developing such adaptive solutions, it is most important to understandthe new relevance of design of processes and interfaces that came with the Web 2.0.This paper is an attempt to muster some ideas, concepts and metaphors (as tools tothink) that have surfaced in the highly fragmented and distibuted Web 2.0 designdiscourse, and build them into a (still provisory) conceptual framework for furtherdiscussion.

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2 User Experience Design for Microcontent-based Environments

2.1Stop developing software start designing experiences.

Working in a field of constant change, information technology designers habitually dealwith evolving practices, fluid conventions, and unpredictable uses. Brown/Duguid(1994) formulated this caveat over a decade ago, but in the permanent flux that is ICT,the Web 2.04(the term is used in this paper to include t are not just marking oneinnovation step among many others. This is signalling a real paradigm change,comparable only with the evolutionary step towards the personal microcomputer(around 1975), with the change from the DOS-PC-interface to the desktop- and windows-metaphor (around 1985), or with the moment when the PC (plus some occasional mailtraffic) became also, and for some time separately, a browser-driven web-station (around1995).

All this are primarilyculturalevolutions and not so much a matter oftechnologicalinnovation in the narrow sense. The windows/desktop/mouse-combination of themicrocomputer sure was smart technology, but even in 1978 it was not really hi-tech.Neither was the GUI of the Macintosh, or the combination of HTTP, HTML and the firstNetscape browser that formed the Web.

ICT innovation in the field the human-computer interaction, as opposed to deep down inthe machine, cannot be easily modelled after the Higher Faster Farther innovationprocesses of 20th century applying to aeroplanes, or mainframe computers. It seemsmore like going towards more lightweight, more distributed, more networked, moredynamic, more feedback-driven. It is as much a matter of design as of technologicalinnovation. And this is not only relating to the design of new generation devices, but alsoto the design of software, the most prominent examples for this being Apple (iMac,

iPod/iTunes, iPhone) and Google (with its permanent adaptation and optimization ofWeb 2.0 concepts and technologies). This is what OReilly (2005) meant whencharacterizing the Web 2.0 as a platform being based on cross-platform lightweightapplications and iterative lightweight programming of web services.

This poses a fundamental challenge to the development of new smart ICT applications.Formerly one started with the core functionality of the software, before, in a second step,

wrapping it up into some usable interface. This may still work for traditional softwaretools like AutoCAD or Photoshop. But in the open and dynamic digital mediaenvironment of today, the core of successful applications will have to be built by UserExperience Design, with programming coming second:

Stop designing products. Start designing experiences!, claims leading Web 2.0 design

guru Peter Merholz, 5 again making the obligatory reference to iPod/ iTunes. Thecatchphrase Processes are not programs makes a similar point. But professionalsoftware projects, not only in R&D, seem to be far off this mark yet, as Buxton (2007, p.

4 The term Web 2.0 is used throughout this paper to include also the Mobile Web 2.0(Jaokar/Fish 2006), mainly as a descriptive term for the changes in the Web following the boomof blogs, tagging, feeds, and user-driven social and semantic software in general. For a definitionthat stood the test of time, a thorough reading of OReilly (2005) is still worthwhile.5 Peter Merholz (www. peterme.com) is an early blogger who founded his own renownedcompany, Adaptive Path.

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73) notes: [] one of the most significant reasons for the failure of organizations todevelop new software products in-house is the absence of anything that a designprofessional would recognize as an explicit design process.

2.2 Subject Positions and Software Postures

Like socio-cultural discourses, different technologies and different media incorporatespecific subject positions (Foucault 1982), which limit the field of possibilities forexperiences and activities and, mostly non-consciously, superimpose a specific frame ofmind and pattern of thinking onto each individual who is using a technology orinteracting with certain media.

This goes for software, digital devices and digital media. The look & feel of the interface,the possibilities for interaction and experiences, the structure and the flow as well as thesemantics of the contents all this is defining something like a place an individual hasto step in and accommodate to.

The overall subject position for a concrete digital media usage scenario can be described

itself as the effect of an overlapping of partial subject positions. These are created byspecial pieces of software (like MS Word), by the wider software environment it isembedded in (the OS), and by the functionality and interface of a specific device (like aDesktop PC, a laptop, a PDA, a smartphone, a gamebox ). And each of this sub-positions, as well as the general one, is a complex effect of specific technological, culturaland social factors incorporated in the design of the media and in the patterns of mediause.

In a PC/desktop context, the common concept of the user is a quite limited subjectposition, mostly related to what the designers Cooper/Reinmann (2003) call sovereignposture programs (ibid., 103 ff.):

best used full-screen;

monopolizing the users attention for long periods of time; offering a large set of related functions and features;

users tend to keep them up and running continuously;

dominating a user's workflow as his primary tool, even if other programs are usedfor support tasks.

This is opposed to supplementing transient posture programs, that come and go,presenting a single, high-relief function (ibid., 106), and daemonic posture programsthat are completely hidden in the background (ibid., 111).

Popular examples of sovereign posture programs are specialized desktop applicationslike Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop or AutoCADother specialized programs and Web

Access applications built to mimic a main desktop app (e.g. MS Project). At the level ofWeb-based information access, the equivalent is the visiting of portal sites, like forexample looking up books at the Library of Congress website (http://catalog.loc.gov).

Now, as the tool paradigm of the desktop terminal is finally giving way to theinformation space paradigm of the Web, the familiar system of sovereign, transient, anddaemonic program postures is changing too. A piece of software is not so much definingits own posture anymore, but acting as a part of a wider ecosystem. In the perspective ofthe users, they are not interacting with sovereign applications, not even with the

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browser, which rapidly becomes a sort of environment itself, but with a meta-softwarecalled the Web.

2.3 Point of Presence

I dont just use the Internet, so why am I a user? The complaint came from RobertScoble, famous blogger and then Web 2.0 evangelist at Microsoft.6 Having the full rangeof modular Web 2.0 applications at command simultaneously, the Web subject finallyfeels like a digital being, living in the center of an immersive digital lifeworld.

When the concepts of usability and human-centered design had been introduced intothe world of IT by Jacob Nielsen and Don Norman, over a decade ago, this had been animprovement, compared with former program development done by software engineers.But still the side of the user had mainly been restricted to functionality, limited tasksand measurable outcomes, while the human factors (needs, satisfaction) remained

vague. In the digital media environment, the limited concepts of the software user andusability are rapidly losing relevance, as they apply to a world of tools, not to the worldof digital media.

Designing for the new subject position is not the same as human-centered design. It isjust not about taking the human factors better into account, ergonomically andpsychologically. Instead, it has to be based on an analysis of the systematic position thata specific media environment and a specific piece of software are sparing out forindividuals to step in.

This characteristic general subject position of Web 2.0 can be characterized, more or lessmetaphorically, as a Point of Presence (PoP). In telecommunications, a PoP is thephysical or virtual place where a connection is made available to a user who is dialing upinto the network via the local access line. Idehen (2006) later used the term to defineWeb 2.0:

A phase in the evolution web usage patterns that emphasizes Web Services basedinteraction between Web Users' and Points of Web Presence [exposed APIs]over traditional Web Users and Web Sites based interaction. Basically, atransition from visual site interaction to presence based interaction.

But this notion of Points of Web Presence can also be turned around. Human mindsare part of the Web 2.0 system, which relies largely on user generated content and theprofiles of user interactions to create its specific dynamics of circulation andpersonalization.

From this perspective, the Web service is the user, and the mind of a human individualis the entry point to a mental and semantic network, that the service needs to connectitself to create value. As soon as the individual is connecting to the Web, a new instance

of the Point of Presence is created for both sides.This also means that the Web subject, as soon as connecting to the Web, has thecharacteristic experience of a fresh new start into an open space of possibilities.Exaggerating for the purposes of illustration, the biographical and the professionalidentity seems in a way to be erased. At the beginning there is always just presence, the

6 Robert Scoble, I dont just use the Internet, so why am I a user? Posted in the Blog'Scobleizer' (11/10/2005). http://scobleizer.com/2005/11/10/i-dont-use-the-internet-so-why-am-i-a-user/, accessed 08/01/2007.

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blank page of the mind, which is still best symbolized by the minimalistic Web 2.0design of the Google Search start page. The famous old Microsoft Internet taglineWhere do you want to go today? contains also the question Who do you want to

become today?, and the implied answers are anywhere and anybody. In a way, ineach new Web session a persona is being built from scratch, not consciously, but as a by-effect of a flow of clicks that is building up an individual story.7

Although one still usually does have the PoP experience when sitting at some sort ofdesk, it is related to the life-form of digital nomads. The PC is not a desktop, it is alaptop, being closer to McLuhans bodily extension of man. Mobility from thatperspective is only secondarily a topographic experience: The both medial and mentalpossibility to be anybody anywhere anytime opens up the possibility to use all the non-spaces and times-in-between typical for supermodern life (Aug 1994).

As a consequence of these nearly anthropological changes, Web 2.0 applications have tobe designed for the new Point of Presence subject position from the beginning. There isno fundamental difference here between applications designed for entertainment or

work, for private or professional contexts. It is just the built-in structural position ofWeb 2.0-as-media, as opposed to the structural position of the user of a Personal

Desktop Computer.8 Especially, it is not to be mistaken for the cockpit position of toolsoftware, like e.g. the Photoshop interface. A cockpit position is user-centered, but notcreating the full/void position of the Web 2.0 subject. A personalizedMySomething

website is a sort of cockpit too, despite being adapted to an individual profile.9

The PoP subject position is something like an anthropological background for the newDigital Lifestyle, helping to understand some concrete concepts and consequences fordesign that will be sketched out in the following paragraphs.

To put it in headlines: Web 2.0 applications will have to be designed

for micromedia technologies, devices and circulation systems optimized fortransmitting and processing content in the form of meme-sized microcontent-chunks;

for dramatically different patterns ofattention and developing along with thesimultaneous use of digital information sources and applications;

for new, complex structures of the digital environment, enhanced byperipheriesand background, allowing for different kinds offocus and peripheral view;

in the form ofinterfaces for modular lightweight micro-applications, that arecombining perceived simplicity, flow-quality and gesture-driven directness withthe enriching seamfulness abstract sign layers are adding to the lifeworld.

7 This is also a structural reason for the breakdown of the borders between private andprofessional use of the Web, as well as between the respectable subject and the seeker for kickswho always is just a click away from porn, poker or strange YouTube videos.8 It is interesting to note that here the world of the laptop and the world of the mobile phone arealready converging even when the devices have not yet merged into the convergent ubiquitousmedia scenario that is to be expected for the near future.9 The interesting borderline case would be the opened up social software site Facebook since ithad been opened for all sorts of Web 2.0 plug-ins in 2007.

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3 Micromedia and Microcontent

The new digital media environments are micromedia environments. Media is here to beunderstood in a threefold sense: (a) as media technologies: technological systems for(mass) sign transmission and circulation; (b) as media content: content formatted fortransmission and circulation; (c) as media space: the immersive environment created bymedia in the sense of (a) and (b).

There seem to be some independent tendencies towards micromedia and microcontent.As McLuhan (2001) noted, electric media (telegraphy, telephony) changed the pressfrom the start, replacing the long written essays of printed journals with the highlyfragmented mosaic of news and ads. Over the long range, in radio and TV a similarshift from standalone, elaborate pieces towards a temporal mosaic of small units (clips,news, pop songs ) can be observed.

Since digital technology has turned media in the mid-90Ts, two parallel trends towardan ever more rapid circulation of ever smaller pieces of content have shown:

First, with small-sized handheld devices, especially phones-with-screens, we have seen aremarkable comeback of media technologies that are characterized by [relatively] lowresolution, low fidelity, and slow speeds (Manovich 2000), as opposed to broadband andmultimedia technologies that are aiming toward more (more resolution, better color,

better visual fidelity, more bandwidth, more immersion). And Manovich prophesizedwith respect to networked cell phones that minimalist media or micro-media wouldnot only successfully compete with macro-media but may even overtake it in popularity(ibid.). This has to do with the different subject position these personal media areopening for the individuals.

Second, even on the larger screens of the PC content now tends to become microcontent.

After Google had been shreddering the macro-content of the document-/page-basedWeb 1.0 to small pieces loosely joined (Weinberger 2002), the Web 2.0 is nowconsisting mainly of clouds of small content clips. They are small in respect to the spacethey need on the screen, in the systems memory, and in respect to the time theprocessing consumes within the computational system (download time) and the humanmind (attention span). Avant-gardists of the Web 2.0 noted this tendency as soon as2002, leading to the still valuable definition of Dash (2003):

Microcontent is information published in short form, with its length dictated bythe constraint of a single main topic and by the physical and technical limitationsof the software and devices that we use to view digital content today. We'vediscovered in the last few years that navigating the web in meme-sized chunks is

the natural idiom of the Internet.Dashs further definition can be systematically boiled down to three points which applyto the level of machines as well as to the level of human users. (See Lindner (2006b) formore details and references.) Microcontent is

self-contained the smallest unit that can stand for itself in computational,mental and socio-cultural contexts;

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individually addressable for computers (through permalinks) and humans(through their rhetorical meme-quality);

appropriately formattedfor easy consumption and further re-use (like e.g.microformats and the convention of blog posts both oscillatting betweencultural form and machine-readable format).

This matches well with the definition the Web economist Umair Haque has been givenfor micromedia. He is concentrating on the radical impact of new microcontent-basedtechnologies, applications and services on traditional mass media, especially the newsand the music industry. According to him, in the context of an emerging highly dynamic,open and fragmented digital attention economy, micromedia (plural) are digitalatomized media that can be consumed in unbundled microchunks and aggregated andreconstructed in hyperefficient ways. (Haque 2005)

This paradigm change is transforming the whole ecosystem of content production,reception and circulation. Whether we like it or not (and there are reasons for both),micromedia and microcontent will not go away. This poses two main challenges:

How can human microinformation experiences become integrated into the

complex context which is formed by the usage of one device (or the simultaneoususage of multiple devices), by the workflow, by the personal flow of tasks (be itprofessional or private), and finally by the socio-cultural context of the media

being used?

What forms of guidance and steering could possibly be designed to feel naturalfor a micromedia user?

To meet these challenges, new patterns of attention and focus will have to be fullyunderstood and considered.

4 Attention, Focus, and the Workplace 2.04.1 Continuous Partial Attention

Continuous partial attention is a post-multitasking adaptive behaviour. Being connectedmakes us feel alive. ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder] is a dysfunctional variant ofcontinuous partial attention. Continuous partial attention isn't motivated byproductivity, it's motivated by being connected.

Such Linda Stone (2005) lately defined the influential term she herself had coined asearly as 1998, while being a researcher for Microsoft. She was one of the first proposing apositive perspective on a phenomenon that still is mostly discussed as alarmed accountof the dangers for productivity posed by multitasking, distraction, and lifeinterrupted.10 Like Bryant (2006) and Brown/Duguid (1999), Stone seems to assume

that the experience of Information Overload typically occurs where outdatedorganizational structures and psychological patterns are confronted with a newenvironment consisting of differently structured (micro-)information.

From this perspective, the solution to information overload is not less digitalinformation, but more information (David Weinberger11) but structured and presentedin different ways, in the form of microcontent and meta-content (Bryant 2006).

10 For a first account of empiric research by the professors David Levy and Gloria Marks see forexample Seven (2004).

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There is a growing need for (nearly) simultaneous attention for multiple sources ofdynamic information something that formerly was expected only from high-levelmanagers. (So in a way, the inflationary use of the word manager for definitions ofmore ordinary jobs has some reason after all )

The ongoing, quite extensive discussion of attention in the context of digital media

cannot be summarized here. In any case, the implicit concept of a subject of attention isclosely related with Point of Presence and subject position. As a subject of attention,the real person appears to be a double-natured: a mind, and as user. On one hand acognitive system with certain limitations for dealing with media-induced informationabundance. On the other hand, from the Web 2.0 perspective, the user as a source ofattention is being used, a kind of human agent used for the circulation and semanticenrichment of selfish memes.12

In a digital (micro-)media usage scenario, attention problems especially occur where thesubject constituting itself at the Point of Presence is (a) confronted with moretraditional roles and concepts for knowledge and information work, and/or (b) is notsupported by well-designed adaptive applications and interfaces.

Unfortunately, it seems that empiric research has not brought up yet a convincingconcept for the basic unit of attention (Cavanagh/Alvarez 2005), which could be usedas something like the currency in the attention economy. But it may well turn out in theend that this approach is too reductionist anyway13 for modeling a complex phenomenonoccurring at the intersection of cognition, computing, and the media, with additionalsocio-cultural undercurrents.

Still, neuropathologists Sohlberg/Mateer (1989) have proposed a quite useful typologyfor characterizing the attention environment of a typical Information Worker (and in thefuture, every Web subject will have to be one in some respect):

Focused attention: The ability to respond discretely to specific visual, auditory ortactile stimuli.

Selective attention: The capacity to maintain a behavioral or cognitive set in theface of distracting or competing stimuli.

Sustained attention: The ability to maintain a consistent behavioral responseduring continuous and repetitive activity.

Alternating attention: The capacity for mental flexibility that allows individualsto shift their focus of attention and move between tasks having different cognitiverequirements.

Divided attention: The ability to respond simultaneously to multiple tasks ormultiple task demands.

The workflow in project-based teams as well as the Web 2.0 media environment, in

which this workflow increasingly has to take place, divided and alternating attentioncease to be exceptions and tend to become normal behavior, leading to attention stress.

11 The cure to information overload is more information: The power of tags shows that the way tomanage information overload is more information. David Weinberger, Entry in Joho The Blog,05/24/2005, URL: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/004037.html12 The concept of memes has been introduced, playfully and provocatively, by Richard Dawkinsin his book The Selfish Gene (1975). It has since been quite popular as a suggestive metaphorfor phenomena of semantic emergence in the Web.13 Actually it seems that Scientology has developed its own theory of units of attention

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The challenge for micromedia design is then to help manage sustained and alternatingattention, both in a certain software environment (like in the Windows OS, in thesmartphone OS, or even in a tabbed browser) and in the wider scenario of media usage(like the office or the backpack of the mobile worker), including different media anddifferent devices with their spatial and socio-cultural relations.

4.2 Focus

Four levels may be distinguished for modeling the abstract Continuous PartialAttention environment that is unfolding around a given digital Point of Presence. Thetendency is that digital media are modeling a richly structured environment, acrossapplications, platforms and devices, that is comparable to a multidimensional real worldscenario (say: the office). The different levels correspond to different grades of focus:

Main Focus: Still there is one object and one application in the main focus at one time:usually some kind of text. What has changed, is the character and granularity of theobject. When attention and focus are increasingly divided and alternating, the mainfocus becomes restricted to objects that can be grasped within one unit of attention.

These units can be longer and shorter, depending on the flow of the situation (seebelow), but typically former macro-content gets fragmentarized as much by the newattention patterns as it is has become shreddered by Google search results or blogcoverage. So the greater object that is in main focus is losing its clear boundary too,more and more resembling a bundle of small pieces loosely joined. From othermicrocontent around it is distinguished through stronger gravitational forces, which areeffects of personal interest, inherent semantics, and design.

Semi-focus: In a macro-content environment the semi-focus is reserved forsupplementary applications and contents, similar to a dictionary being used asidereading a book, or an example being looked up while following a main argumentationthead. In the Web 2.0 context, these semi-focused content becomes much moreimportant. It is nearly as the horizon would be widening, but replacing main focus bysome kind of new semi focus which is bringing forward new horizontal and (in the

widest sense) visual patterns while certainly losing in vertical depth and linearargumentation. Both at the rhetoric and at the graphic level, microcontent typically isdesigned for semi-focus attention, for being caught at one glance.

Peripheral focus: Beyond the sphere of objects being semi-focused, eithersimultaneously or alternatingly, there is an even wider sphere for glancing sidewardsfrom the corner of the eyes. The function of peripheral structures is to embed and tocontextualize the focused contents, but also to ensure quick reactuons if necessary: [W]ekeep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something moreimportant emerges. (Stone 2005). Applications designed for peripheral focus are e.g.dynamic alert boxes signaling new incoming e-mails.

Casual focus:A variation of theperipheral focus, which can at any time change intosemi-focus, is a more playful casual focus (Tams 2006). This is typical for the mediaeffect of the PC-based Web and mobile phones alike: Because there is always moreinformation out there, the subject is felling provoked to permanently explore this spaceof opportunities. In fact, the Web 2.0 has even been characterized, among many otherthings, as the Casual Web. Everybody who has done creative work knows thatexperiencing this space of possibilities is quite important for high-level productivity. It isfilled with gaming, if appropriate informations (photos, gossip, jokes, blog posts, news

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clips ) are not available. Again, the challenge is to design new applications andinterfaces in a way that is keeping this space open while making it an integral part of the

whole system of productivity. Typical for the new environment is the blurring of bordersnot only between working and learning, and work and private life, but also between workand play. Well-designed micro-attention applications have to take this into account.

Background (non-focus): Generally every part of the environment with a lesser degree ofattention/focus is relatively background, staying in latency. But there is also some sortofpermanentbackground, which normally is never being focused, but permanently

being felt, stabilizing or destabilizing the whole situation. Most important for the field ofis probably the general feel of openness or closedness communicated by digital media.Either one is acting in a (potentially) open space (the Web) or in the walled garden of anapplication. Both can make sense in different contexts and for different people. ( Formany, it is assuring to use Microsoft Office tools that communicate the stable feeling of aclosed system in which every aspect has already been thought of, in opposition to theWild Wild Web where everybody is self-responsible and unexpected things might occurat any corner, anytime.)

4.3 Periphery

The evolution of digital media towards micromedia can be described as a change fromhighly restricted areas of focus (macrocontent objects, sovereign posture programs) to akind of environment where semi-focused and peripheral attention plays a much moreimportant role.

In 1994, John Seely Brown published an important essay on border and periphery as themain challenge for information design at the dawning of the World Wide Web.

According to him, the world seen through the computer screen is lacking the peripheralvision needed to provide the rich context that alone makes information really useful andmeaningful for a human user (Brown 1994).

This is exactly what the Web 2.0, including new Intranets and the converging MobileWeb, seems to be addressing. Digital media are not so much creating a workplace, or anew communication medium, but a lifeworld in itself. They are providing social context,

via social software of all kinds, as well as semiotic context, that fills the gap betweenmain focus and the non-conscious background.

Actually, a large part of Continous Partial Attention is invested in information thatmakes the subject feel alive, that is, taking part in a sphere of vital circulation:Continuous partial attention is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities. We

want to ensure our place as a live node on the network, we feel alive when we'reconnected. (Stone 2005)This desire, not productivity in the narrow sense14, is the realreason why managers get addicted to mobile e-mail clients like the Blackberry or whyteenagers look into their mobile phone screens in every idle moment. Concepts of ICTthat ignore the playfulness of digital media will be probable to fail in the future.

14 Probably productivity should be understood in a very wide sense, including all activities thatare building structures of some kind over time, be they professional, hobby or just private.Interestingly, this is the approach of David Allens bestseller Getting Things Done, the bible forself management in a digital media age. In some passages it reads like a theory of microcontent.

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4.4 Beyond Push/Pull: The Come-to-me Web

The mobile phone has been described as a casual background device, making it easy topop into the foreground for a brief moment before simply falling into the backgroundonce more (Schick 2005). Applications truly geared for the mobile lifestyle need to takeadvantage of this background status, says Nokia usability researcher Charlie Schick.

Being itself by nature a foreground device designed for main focus, the PC has shownto model periphery and casualitywithin the screen: in the form of additional layers anditems at the level of the desktop interface (e.g. widgets, e-mail alerts ), at the level ofRSS-driven aggregation pages (e.g. iGoogle, Pageflakes, SuprGlu ) and at the level ofthe browser (tabs, Firefox plug-ins).

Designing for these kinds of environments means designing for semi-focused orperipheral attention, and for the intuitive slipping of content from background toforeground and back again. This is what the Research Studio eLearning Environments isattempting with its concept of Integrated Microlearning and the KnowledgePulse-application.15

The ambient character of these concepts is differing from the old idea of Pull vs. Push

which belongs to the first generations of the Web. Back then, there had been also adiscussion about dealing with an abundance of information and media that just couldnt

be handled anymore by people searching for some content, like in a library or acatalogue, and then clicking on a link to call it up on their screen (pull). Somehow thecontent had to come to the user/consumer (push). In 1997, a big essay in Wiredmagazine (Kelly et al. 1997) proclaimed the end of the pull-Web and the advent ofdigital push media that are always on, mobile, customizable. An application that wassomething like a hybrid of an ambient screensaver and the media-push of TV had then

been developed byPointkast, a much-hyped multi-million dollar start-up thatspectacularly collapsed in 1999.

This old pull/push-opposition belonged to a time when static content was shown on asingle-focus screen. It is different from the emerging dimension of the Come-to-me

Web (Vander Wal 2006), which is a function of the micromedia environment of theWeb 2.0, statring with the evolution of weblogs and feeds (since 1999, but gaining realmomentum four years later).

The Come-to-me Web is going beyond the pull-metaphors of wayfinding and librarysearch and beyond the push-metaphor of watching TV. It is based on attraction andassociation:

Today's usage is truly focused on the person and how they set their personalinformation workflow for digital information. The focus is slightly different. Pushand pull focused on technology, today the focus is on person and technology is

just the conduit, which could (and should) fade into the background.

Because the Web is transforming into a dense network of socio-semantic associations, Iexperience my activities less as pull/push, but as attracting content which has alreadybeen there in the background, like an Info Cloud following me across devices,platforms, and applications (Vander Wal 2003).

This is in fact neither push nor pull. It is neither going to get information, like in alibrary, nor is it a message obtrusively pushed at me, like a pop-up window or apromotion e-mail. It is much more casual and ambient, more of an extension of my

15 http://www.knowledgepulse.com, http://www.microlearning.org

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attention horizon.16 Successful smart applications will have to fit in a digital ecosystemthat is modeled after information experiences in the Real World. Interacting with the

Web 2.0 (or the Web 2.91 ) will be like walking down the street17or sitting in a caf,floating in information spaces with ever changing levels of focus, from background andperiphery to semi-focus and main focus and back again.

This experience can happen in the world outside, like in real cafes, using the mobilephone for accessing the Web as an additional semantic layer, or as well in interiorsmeant for focus and work, which are becoming are much more world-like through thenew digital media of the Web 2.0.

In such an ambient foreground/background environment, a real push would beexperienced as something very obtrusive: Like someone on the street getting in your wayand demanding your exclusive attention. This is not just a question of technology,though. To accept the push, the user has to understand the pushing content, be itinformation, advertising or educational, as an external representation of her own needsand desires. But again, in reality this is very rarely the case.

5 Interface and Interaction Design

User-experience design cannot be limited to the graphical user interface itself, butincludes interaction design and information architecture as well. De facto there areseveral levels of interfaces clustering around the user: (a) the interface of the devices-plus-OS (e.g. a Windows Vista laptop, a Nokia Series 60 smartphone); (b) the interfacesof desktop applications (programs in the old sense, like MS Word); (c) the interfaces ofnew widget-clients that tend to present only one type of microcontent they get as a WebService (e.g. a weather widget, or a microblogging client interacting with a Web servicelike Twitteroo); (d) the browser itself, since it came to be more than an application for

browing pages, but a sort of Operating System for the new webtop (like Firefox with

different plug-ins).

Evidently, in such a multi-interface environment there are special problems for interfacedesign that cannot be covered here in detail, but two important issues are the flow andthe seams. Interface design has to consider different devices and applications, in a waythat allows multitasking in space and in time. In space, when different windows (browsertabs, widgets) are open simultaneously. In time, because in a multitasking/microtaskingsituation, with continuing partial attention, it is important to enable interruptions

without breaking the flow. This calls for a concept of flow that exceeds beyond traditionalinteraction design, which is concentrating on single-focus, sovereign-posture userscenarios.

16 Approaches to advertisement that adapt to the new subject position are Google Adsense and,of course, the famous Amazon recommendations (People who have bought this book have alsobought ).

17 James Corbett, Actually we're all edge cases... and promiscuous. Entry in weblog EirePreneur.Doing microbusiness in Ireland. 02/02/2006.URL: http://eirepreneur.blogs.com/eirepreneur/2006/02/actually_were_a.html

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5.1 The Flow

The main concern of interaction design has always been not breaking the flow. Cooper(2003) uses the term flow 61 times in the seminal work Face 2.0. The Essentials ofInteraction Design, one time explicitly giving credit to Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist,

who had introduced the influential concept in 1975 to describe a kind of experience he

had noticed while observing people engaged in sport activities and creative work.According to Csikszentmihalyi (1990), a flow experience shows the followingcharacteristics: the feeling of gliding effortlessly from one instant to the next; noseparation between self and environment, stimulus and reaction, past, present andfuture; rewarding in itself; high satisfaction or even a gentle sense of euphoria; neitheractive nor passive; the feeling of being in charge (intuitively, not in a way ofmanipulating objects).

In the field of HCI, five dimensions of flow can be identified. They all have to be takeninto account when designing for the new digital media environment. Cooper (2003) usesthe term in a threefold sense:

for the usability flow, that is the programmed normal flow of system activities

and interactions, both visual and logical;

for the users workflow, both within a task and between related tasks;

for a specific design that is aiming at software becoming transparent, makingpossible media flow experiences in the narrower sense of Csikszentmihalyi amain feature for this is gesture-driven embodied interaction (Dourish 2001).

Especially for the first and the third dimension of the flow, perceived simplicity(Skogen 2006) is crucial. Famous examples are the designs of Apple and Google, asopposed to Microsoft and (formerly) Yahoo. Here simplicity is not primarily realized onthe logical level of a usable interaction structure (though that remains important, ofcourse), but on an aesthetic level.

A fourth dimension of flow not mentioned by Cooper is also important for HCI: Theimplicit flow structure of the type of media environment, which is different on the officedesktop, on the always-on Web PC, on the PDA, or on the mobile phone.

And finally there is a fifth flow concept that may be even more relevant for micromediadesign. Introduced by Williams (1974), it is used for describing a then new experience of

watching TV brought on by commercial stations, the introduction of the remote control,and Cable TV. The users were put in the center, creating their own personal flow on topof the programs. From that time on, the TV screen was not experienced as a window ora stage anymore, but has taken on the look & feel of monitoring in a control room,

with all kinds of digital information inserts and frequent change of viewpoints.

While the habit of following the programmed flow can be compared to the usability

flow of desktop software and the Web 1.0, the new user-centered, much more anarchicflow is pointing forward to the Point of Presence and the dynamic microcontent cloud of

Web 2.0.

5.2 Seamfulness

The aim of flow-orientated Interface Design is to make software become transparent.This is related to Mark Weisers ideal of seamlessness, where the ideal interface would

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be one that isnt even experienced as an interface anymore. For the user, the dimensionof the human and the dimension of the machines would become one.

But a world without seams is also a world with less meaning. In fact, professionals whoare immersed in a Web 2.0 working environment have already started to use 3 browsersat once, one each for certain tasks or certain contexts, in addition to having opened

multiple tabs within in each browsers. This is a rather crude reintroduction of interfacesinto a situation where technology had already created a unified space.

A similar effect is created by the multiple devices of the current Digital Lifestyle: laptop,mobile phone, MP3 device, digital camera, maybe a Blackberry. From the perspective ofmedia experience, it is quite doubtful that there ever will be one ring to rule them all.Multiple devices add structure and meaning, and enable subtle changes of subjectpositions for the users. The same goes for the multiple small applications that togetherform the Web 2.0 environment of today.

It seems that just because digital media are so powerful in overcoming restrictions oftime and space, they are calling for re-introducing structure in some way or another. Ifapplications are well designed, for example, they would enforce the basic structure of the

micromedia environment the field of main focus, semi-focus, peripheral view andbackground. Each of this levels, and each of the objects embedded there, have their owninterfaces. Chalmers/Galani (2004) would call this designing for seamfulness.

They are also offering an additional explanation for the problems with seamlessness: Aninteractive media system that is too complex and too perfect may fail because of givingthe users no possibility to participate, adapt and appropriate, while another systemmight succeed not despite, but exactly because it is made up of inexpensive, easilymanipulated, visible pieces. They draw the conclusion to deliberately design forappropriation, aiming for systems that are robust, flexible, simple, manipulable andovert:

By overt, we mean the underlying mechanisms of such systems are made visible,as a precondition for the other requirements that provide a basis for appropria-tion. Such visibility is seamful, rather than seamless. This overt visibility shouldprobably also aiming for be reducible to peripheral awareness []

This is related to the importance of an experience ofopenness, which is, at least in thefield of consumer media, not brought about by perfect subliminal technologicalinfrastructure, but by a seamful, imperfect one. (For some more remarks on designingfor openness, see Lindner (2006b).)

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6 Conclusion

The aim of this paper was to sketch out a conceptual framework for a furthersystematical discussion of the design of smart applications within a more and moreubiquituous micromedia and monomedia environment, in the sense of MatthewChalmers (2001):

We have found it useful to consider the many media, technologies and spaces asone design medium, because each persons experience depends on them all.Peoples activity continually combines and cuts across different media,interweaving those media and building up the patterns of association and usethat make meaning.

Point of Presence, Continuous Partial Attention, different levels of focus, peripheralview, background/foreground, Come-to-me Web, Info Cloud, flow, perceived simplicity,openness, appropriation, seamfulness, By introducing a set of concepts collected from

very different sources, this environment has been shown to have its inner logic, whichmust be understood when designing new applications, even more when outlining a R&Dstrategy for the next 3 4 years.

The starting point for all these considerations has been theKnowledge Pulse, themicrolearning application developed by the ARC Studio eLearning Environments, andpossible future interrelations with the R&D work in the other Research Studios. Somehints for the design of microlearning applications have been given in Lindner (2006),including a chart comparing similar products in the perspective of micromedia design.

In a way, this is a piece of software that is positioned at the boundary between Web 1.0and Web 2.0. It can be conceptualized either as a push-based learning machine or as anintegral part of a future Come-to-me Web. The problem here seems to be that the

concept of push- learning doesnt fit well into the new microcontent-based mediaenvironment, and the subject positions going with it. But at the same time, the gap

between the rapid evolution of the Micro-Web and the mental and practical adoption ofmainstream users is widening. This leads to certain dilemma: old structures of learningand interaction do not work anymore, while new structures havent been building up yet.

This dilemma is typical and not limited to the field of e-learning. It seems less and lesspossible to meet the main challenges of smart applications development at the level ofone single application. With microcontent-based digital media, an evolving ecosystemhas to be considered that is calling for new concepts. Contents and attention flows arenot limited anymore to one application, to one software environment (like the PC-desktop or the Web), or to one platform (the PC-centered Web or the Mobile Web).

The problems posed by the digital climate change towards microcontent andmicromedia have to be addressed in a wider context. Processes are not programs, designis becoming as important as software development. The specific structure of theResearch Studios Austria opens up the possibility to take a holistic perspective on thenew phenomena, combining perspectives from different fields. The chance for R&D in ahighly innovative and dynamic field is to understand the deeper structures and to followlonger-term strategies, while adapting as quick as possible to the permanent innovationin the digital ecosystem.

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Stop designing products. Start designing integrated experiences!

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