Personal information ecologies erickson

Personal Information Ecologies: PIM in the Age of Sensors and Social Networks

Thomas Erickson Social Computing Group IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

CSCW 2012 Workshop on Personal Information Management Bellevue, Washington February 12, 2012

* Thanks to Jonathan Feinberg for his great service at http://wordle.net

Preface

is is a keynote for the CSCW 2012 Workshop on Personal Information Management (PIM). e tag cloud on the previous page shows the content of the submissions abstracts, with very common terms, like PIM, omitted.

I come at PIM from two directions. I have long made concerted (some would say obsessive) efforts to design ways of managing my own personal information. And I’ve also worked on PIM research and development projects, primarily in the late 80’s and early 90’s during my years at Apple – so I come to the topic with a bit of perspective – and the fabled 20-20 hindsight.

In this talk I reflect on my research, and the lessons that were learned (or that should have been learned). ese include the spatial nature of PIM, hunters and gatherers, guilt piles; and the Prime Dogma of PIM. I also discuss how things have changed since then, and offer two provocative examples of some of the new forms of PIM that are emerging as we see the rise of sensor-generated personal information, and the increasing use of PIM as a social currency.

© 2012 Thomas Erickson Social Computing Group, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center slide 2

The Talk

Looking Backward: A Walk Down Memory Lane •  PIM in the Material World •  Making PIM Digital

How Things have Changed!

Looking Forward: Two Provocative Examples •  Social Meets Sensors •  Death Don’t Have no Mercy


PIM in the Material World

In the footsteps of Tom Malone  How Do People Organize Their Desks? (1983)

 Note that we were not the first to study PIM. We took inspiration from the work of Tom Malone, and others.


Look, an adding machine, how cool is that?


The Artifacts Study (circa 1989–90)  How do you manage your personal information?

Show us the tools you use. Walk us through your day. Tell us about a failure of your system.


Yes, the picture in front is not circa 1990, but it’s apt. e one in back is of Apple in that era…


The Artifacts Study: Items of interest  Daytimer, notebook, post-its, tape recorder, voice

mail, files & folders (paper), stacks, &c   PCs with their files & folders,

email, floppy disks, &c  And of course the practices

in which these artifacts were embedded


Notice all the artifacts, and how they’re distributed around the landscape of the office.


The Artifacts Study: ‘Findings’  A spectrum of styles: Hunters and Gatherers

Hunters  Hunters exert relatively little

energy organizing incoming information.

  Like often ends up with like   Effort is spent finding

information when it is needed   But hunters usually know

where to search, because they they know the ‘habits’ of their information, and that it tends to be found in certain territories


A Hunter’s Office



Gatherers  Gatherers exert lots of

energy organizing incoming information.

  Information is organized to support particular tasks using artifacts and personal ‘systems’ (e.g., notations)

 A Gatherer, at least in theory, needs to exert little effort to find things. They are ‘at hand’


A Hunter’s Office

A Gatherer’s Office



The Hunter-Gatherer Tradeoff  Hunters’ systems are robust:

they are not very efficient, but they rarely fail badly

 Gatherers’ systems are fragile: if a gatherer gets overloaded, and fails to invest the energy to keep the system working, catastrophic collapse can occur


A Hunter’s Office




Some Design Implications   If Gatherers have to hunt,

they usually fare poorly because they’ve created an artificial terrain and can’t guess where the information will be

  The unified in-box concept (one place for email, voice mail, faxes, etc.) •  It’s not great for Hunters

because it mixes different stuff together in one place.

•  And Gatherers don’t want them either – they want to get stuff out of the inbox


A Hunter’s Office



The Artifacts Study: ‘Findings’

The “Guilt Pile”  A document or piece of mail arrives  You don’t have time to deal with it…  …and so you put it on a pile on your desk


A Guilt Pile

I particularly like how this pile is delicately balanced on desk’s edge




 As time passes the pile grows larger  You can see things embedded in it  You begin to feel uncomfortable


A Guilt Pile





  Finally, prompted by its growing mass  Or a glimpse of something you have to deal with  You sort through it


A Guilt Pile





  Finally, prompted by its growing mass  Or a glimpse of something you have to deal with  You sort through it

 You can discard quite a bit of no longer relevant stuff  You pick out a couple of things to deal with  You put the smaller, neater, more stable pile back  And you feel good


A Guilt Pile



“Guilt Pile” Design Implications  An effective instance needs to be visible   Ideally, it is composed of non-uniform materials

so that its content is legible  And so that its state reflects the amount of

effort that has been put into it

And more generally  Our ability to effectively do PIM

is bound up with our sense of self, our feelings of self-efficacy, and our public images


A Guilt Pile

It is only with the advent of the iPhone® that artifacts for digital PIM have achieved the beauty and symbolic weight of the leather-clad Day Runner™, et al.



A side note on the “Guilt Pile”  Others designed and implemented digital “piles”  While the design had many nice features,

it was not true to the eco-systemic nature of piles:   The system would automatically sub-divide and

straighten the piles, eliminating the guilt-driven sorting and winnowing of the pile…


A Guilt Pile

Self-organizing and self-sorting digital piles were cool, but they lost the power of Guilt, a key ally in the battle against entropy


The Accountants Study

A visit to KPMG  Observations   Interviews   Presentation of a vision:

an online library of the company’s reports

Findings  Accountants are largely Gatherers   Interesting artifacts (clipping notebooks) and practices

(skimming, annotating, meta-auditing)  And the enthusiastic but yet deflating response to

“Do you think you would use this?” Yes, but…


But they weren’t actually very interested in the content of the reports. ey wanted to use the reports to find out who the authors were. en they’d call up the author to find out the politics, and the dirt, and useful trivial stuff like what kind of Scotch the CEO liked. … And of course after that, they owed the author a favor…


The Points  Much PIM is mediated by artifacts,

and involves sometimes elaborate practices   PIM also takes place in space:

where the artifacts are matters… and it’s not arbitrary   Some PIM is not mediated by artifacts:

it’s managed by keeping it in the head, and by oral transmission


Making PIM Digital

Rosebud (1990–93)  Designing a Desktop Information System:

Observation and Issues (CHI 1991)

Information access for ordinary users   Focus on the “10,000 database” problem…  …and user discomfort with query languages   But also addressed the PIM-ish problems of

finding and re-finding


ere is much about this paper that now seems quite quaint. …How on earth will users manage to use query languages? But at least we assumed they wouldn’t…

Making PIM Digital

Rosebud (circa 1990)

The User Interface  Reporters searched databases   and maintained columns in

a personal newspaper   newspaper readers

could save articles of interest to a notebook

 Reporters and newspapers were Hunter-oriented…

 Notebooks were, of course, for Gatherers


Making PIM Digital

Rosebud

The Notebook   Temporal organization

(like a pile)  Use of annotations

(as observed on paper)   “Bird’s-eye-view” to

leverage annotations


Quaint or not, I still want this!

Making PIM Digital

Rosebud

The Results   Reporters and a Newspaper

implemented as a product called “Apple Search”, which failed…

 Notebooks not implemented


Making PIM Digital

Proteus (~1993-96)

A Personal Notebook   Implemented in HyperCard  Used for several years  Various means use to track

and analyze use


is paper remains among the most popular on my personal site – however, I have no idea where the hits are coming from.

Making PIM Digital

Proteus (~1993-96)

Structure   ToC showing Sections  … and subsections of

selected section  With a set of navigation,

annotation, and searching controls along the bottom


Making PIM Digital

Proteus (~1993-96)

Structure   Sub-section ToC showing

first line of each page


Making PIM Digital

Proteus (~1993-96)

Structure  And a content page


Making PIM Digital

Proteus (~1993-96)

Two comments  A huge amount of

idiosyncratic complexity co-evolved over time •  Header creation and

reuse in ToC •  Separators •  Ability to “post”

to-do’s I would not have wanted

any of this when I started using the notebook


Making PIM Digital

Proteus (~1993-96)

Two comments  A huge amount of

idiosyncratic complexity co-evolved over time

  The unconsidered incorporation of an email button changed everything!


Making PIM Digital

Proteus (~1993-96)

Synergy!   Because I could easily

email notes, I took care to take better notes: more detail, context, etc

  Because my notes were better, they were more useful to me later, and easier to search for

My ‘Prime Dogma of PIM’   The way in which one uses personal information,

shapes its creation, maintenance and management, which in turn shapes its use


Making PIM Digital

The Points   Throughout, there was a focus on creating

digital variants of PIM artifacts  We were intent on cramming it all into the digital

box that (mostly) sat on the desk.

 We didn’t (or couldn’t) follow up on •  Spatial/ecological aspects

(Hunters and Gatherer’s use of space) •  Social aspects

(Some types of personal information stay ‘in the head’ and are shared orally and person to person)


Making PIM Digital

The Points

The Prime Dogma is still true  Use PI Use’ PI’…

  For instance, “AudioNote” on the iPad is changing my note-taking now

 As is Siri on the iPhone

The Moral   If the use of personal information is so important to how we do PIM,

then we may wish to pay close attention to how those uses are shifting…


We underestimate how big a difference making things radically easy makes. Siri now knows who my Mom is, and where I live.

How Things Have Changed!

1995 - 2005



Personal Info in the Public Sphere

The one thing I was right about • “A personal page is a carefully constructed

portrayal of a person.”

• “For the first time, individuals can project huge amounts of detailed information about themselves to a mass audience”

• “On the positive side, it enables new search strategies based on our social knowledge, it lowers the social cost of accessing and sharing information, and it makes the Web a more interesting and engaging place.”


is section is a list of things I failed to anticipate… but at least I got this right!


The Rise of (Private) Social Networks, Sharing and Broadcasting   Friendster (2002), Orkut (2004), Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006), Linked In (2002)…


One reason that such private social networks proved viable was…


The Success of Online Advertising   Once upon a time it wasn’t clear how to make money by advertising on the web (hard to believe, but true!)   But once it is true, personal information becomes quite valuable, and of interest to Others…


And once online advertising becomes viable, personal information becomes valuable!


The Rise of PIM Intermediaries  All I wanted was to download a paper  All Docstoc.com wanted was


Ghostery: tracking trackers

Lots of entities are interested in where I go on the web!


Self-Tracking  Although it goes back quite a ways,

Manual and automatic self-tracking has become quite a phenomena


Mycrocosm: Visual Microblogging, Assogba and Donath

And the owners of personal information are developing new interests in using it as well


Cheap Popular Sensors  Digital pedometers  Heart rate monitors  miCoach – real time coaching are making it increasingly easy to generate lots of very personal data


is had started by ‘05, but it is really coming on now!


The Points   People are projecting their personal information into the public sphere   They are also amassing more and more personal information in digital form  And there are an increasing range of venues in which it may be used

And so if you believe in the Prime Dogma of PIM, these are very interesting times!


Two Thought-Provoking Examples

Lose-It •  Social Meets Sensors



Lose-It •  Set your goal •  Track your weight



Lose-It •  Buy a wifi scale •  Use an iPhone app •  Or a Fitbit®, or…



Lose-It •  Share it with friends •  and talk about it


Personal information provides grist for conversation


Lose-It •  Join a team



Lose-It •  Share you successes and failures with the team •  and everyone else on Lose-It


And can serve as a sort of social currency in the community


Lose-It •  and do the weekly weigh-in by entering your weight in a Google Doc


If you miss your weekly weigh-in, you get “benched”

Lots of weights reported to the tenth of a pound – digital scales in action?


Lose-It •  Not public enough for you? – configure Twitter and Facebook to publish your updates



And there’s more   Lose-it is just one example…



Death Don’t Have No Mercy  Yesterday Samuel Pepys tweeted several times  …even though he’s been dead for over 300 years



Who is this fellow?   Samuel Pepys (“peeps”)   London, 17th Century   Rose from humble beginnings to

become Secretary of the Navy  Kept a diary from about 1660 to 1670   These were interesting times

•  English Civil War •  Restoration of Charles II •  Great Fire of London •  The Plague •  And a number of more personal

events of interest only to the salacious  Diary was for Pepys’ eyes only

– entries often telegraphic and cryptic



Phil Gyford and PepysDiary.com   Pepys diary republished as a blog   Each day’s entry posted at 11pm London

time (lagged by 344 years)   Every day people arrive and ‘unpack’ each

day’s entry in the comments

  PepysDiary.com has been successful •  Now in its 9th year •  Steady stream of visitors •  Core of consistent commentators •  Very interesting conversations



Why It’s Interesting   Collaborative unpacking of entries   People contribute in a variety of ways

•  Defining archaic word uses •  Providing historical other context •  Asking questions •  Creating cross references •  Providing niche expertise on topics:

e.g., kidney stones, fishing, cannon •  Reprimanding ‘Sam’ for his many

personal failings

  Participants clearly find this fun and engaging, and many return regularly

  It provides a very interesting window into understanding a particular place and a time


A lovely example of the use of personal information – this time not your own! – as a social currency


The Point   is simply that new uses of personal information are constantly emerging   and if we believe “Use PI Use’ PI’…”, we need to study them!


Wrap Up

Once Upon a Time  Much PIM was done via material artifacts  Distributed through a local landscape  According to Hunter and Gatherer logics

  Some PIM was oral and socially mediated


Wrap Up

Then PIM became digital   It got crammed into the box on the desk  And we mostly lost sight of its spatial

and social aspects


Wrap Up

But things have changed, and are changing…


Wrap Up

What should this look like next year?


I’m happy to chat, if you don’t mind occasional lags in the rhythm of email

–Tom [email protected]

Personal information ecologies erickson

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