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This is reading list is for my talk this weekend at SXSW Interactive, It’s About Time: Visualizing Temporality, at 9:30 am Saturday, March 12.
About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution—Paul Davies, Simon & Schuster, 1996
You may have read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and are hungry for more. Davies’s compassionate and intelligent prose provides someone like me with absolutely no background in physics enough meat to chew on.
Language, Thought, and Reality—Benjamin Lee Whorf, The M.I.T. Press, 1956
Benjamin Lee Whorf became one of the most influential linguists of his time, while still working as a fire inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company.
“…the forms of a person’s thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language……”And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.”
“What surprises most is to find that various grand generalizations of the Western world, such as time, velocity and matter, are not essential to the construction of a consistent picture of the universe. The psychic experiences that we class under these headings are, of course, not destroyed; rather, categories derived from other kinds of experiences take over the rulership of the cosmology and seem to function just as well. Hopi may be called a timeless language. It recognizes psychological time, which is much like Bergson’s “duration,” but this “time” is quite unlike the mathematical time, T, used by our physicists. Among the peculiar properties of Hopi time are that it varies with each observer, does not permit of simultaneity, and has zero dimensions; i.e., it cannot be given a number greater than one. The Hopi do not say, “I stayed five days,” but “I left on the fifth day.” A word referring to this kind of time, like the word day, can have no plural.”
The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages —Frederick Bodmer, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1944
“One of the merits of our own language is that we leave much to the context. Whether the English conjunction when refers to an event which has happened once for all, to an event which happens repeatedly, or something which is still going on is immaterial if the setup makes the distinction clear. We do not customarily use whenever unless we wish to emphasize the repetition of a process, and we are not forced to use while unless we wish to emphasize simultaneity. This is not true of German or of Norwegian. If he is talking about something that is over and done with a German uses als where we should use when. A Norwegian uses da.” (he goes on to give more examples)
The Voices of Time: A Cooperative Survey of Man’s Views of Time as Expressed by the Sciences and by the Humanities—J.T. Fraser, Ed., George Braziller, 1966
This is the most comprehensive look at time I’ve encountered. Time in philosophy, religion, language, literature, music, psychology, psychiatry, and a panoply of the sciences. Some of the sections I particularly enjoyed were: Joseph Needham on Time and Knowledge in China and the West, Jean Piaget on Time Perception in Children, M.-L. von Franz on Time and Synchronicity in Analytic Psychology, Milic Capek on “Time in Relativity Theory: Arguments for a Philosophy of Becoming” and of course Fraser’s lovely commentaries here and there like icing on the cake. Fraser was a founding member of the International Society for the Study of Time.
I will be adding to this list of books that touch on time, from time to time.
A child, playing with the same toy over and over again, lives in a single seamless moment from dawn to dusk.
She is living outside time, or maybe deeply within it.
Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s studies of children showed that it is between the ages of six and twelve that kids learn how to order events in sequence, classify durations, and measure time in general. Piaget comments “The child inevitably imagines that when he begins to run, the clock goes more slowly than he does, or that when he walks, the clock goes faster.”
Last summer, my friend Bill walked several hundred miles of the Camino de Santiago, a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage route through Spain and France.
He started off carrying a 40-pound pack, which contained the Camino guidebook, which recommended a brisk daily pace of 30 miles in order to complete the route. On the first day out, maintaining the brisk pace, he twisted his ankle. On the second day, after hobbling along for a few hours, he leaned his pack against a big rock in a ditch, while he lay in the dusty grass , resting his swollen ankle. When he started walking again, he felt much refreshed, until he stopped again to consult his guidebook to see how far he had to go that day…and realized that he had left his glasses on a rock in the ditch, two hours back. At that point he discarded the paperbacks he had brought with him to read in the evenings. Having nothing to read that evening after dinner, he started talking with a fellow pilgrim named Mike, a young runner who had set himself a goal of finishing the pilgrimage in record time. Bill never expected to see Mike again, since Bill with his twisted ankle and lack of glasses was proceeding at a turtle pace across the Spanish landscape. So he was surprised to run across Mike a couple of days later. Mike was sitting at the side of the road with his shoes off. He had gone so fast, for so many miles that his feet were now painfully blistered and he couldn’t walk any more without making the blisters worse. The two of them cooled their heels for a few days, then, so to speak, at a local hostel, getting to know one another, enjoying the excellent local brews, and having deep discussions about pace.
Are you designing a roller coaster or a tea party? What’s the most efficient rhythm of work for the typical person? What pace is going to be the most fun? Every journey has its natural pace, including the paths through an e-commerce form, a game, or a web site. Push it too hard or go too slow, and it’s just painful. Or even impossible. There may be cognitive load constraints that have to be considered. Is the person using the site a novice, or an expert? Are they multi-tasking or will they be giving this effort their single-minded focus?
The mind can absorb no more than the seat of the pants can endure. Is a sequence of tasks something that a person can do in a single sitting? Or are you going to make them get up several times to go find information that they don’t readily have at hand, interrupting their pace? Are you going to make someone click “Next” and “Next” and “Next” without giving them clues as to how long this is really going to take?
Come hear my talk at SXSW Interactive 2011 in Austin! My topic is It’s About Time: Visualizing Temporality. I’m talking at 9:30 am Saturday, March 12.
The key to our flowering at this final stage of our evolutionary cycle lies in the simplicity of being in resonance.
- Jose Argüelles
The image is of Sacred Spaces village at Burning Man 2010.
- Healthy differentiation – no emotional enmeshment
- Effective process for conflict resolution and mediation
- Appreciation of one another’s unique abilities and gifts
- Appropriate transparency and self-disclosure
- Seeking healing for wounds from past interactions
- Commitment not just out of affinity, but to serve a shared vision.
As I have moved to Seattle, and joined a new employer, I want to keep these principles in mind as I interact with a new group of people.
I am thankful to my friend Sally Schreiner Youngquist who gave me this list in a different context, as I was struggling to understand how to be a light in another sort of community.
Survival
There is a certain survival nature in our proclivity toward pictorial information. Being able to accurately assess one’s situation at a glance is an important factor for defending as well as foraging, whether in the forest or the city.
It is interesting that Internet development was a response to a threat to global survival, Bill Washburn once mentioned to me, I think it was around 1995, when we both worked for Mecklermedia (Jupiter Media), the company that created the original Internet World Trade Shows and Internet World publications. The net, he said, provides the impetus and the media and the fertile field for visual language development. It was developed to thrive in a leaderless, anarchic world. (I hope we’re not going there.)
Shared visual experience
Anyone who travels a bit witnesses a multiplicity of common visual cues. Of course there’s the welcome red and white stripe of a Coke sign, signaling refreshment nearby, only one among the many product brands which have become visually ubiquitous and a shorthand for other kinds of information. Signage systems tending toward the uniform have been implemented in transportation arteries.
Of course, there are the common visual cues we’ve always shared as a result of the experience of living on the same planet: sky, sun, stars, trees, rocks, animals, etc. People around the world share more visual experience than at any previous time. With the proliferation of electronic media, this trend is accelerating.
Evolving through data visualization
Our increasing ability to create — and read — visualizations of large, complex, many-dimensional data sets is a manifestation of how we are evolving the “thinking layer” of the planet, as Tielhard de Chardin calls it, which I am assuming is an evolutionary step forward.
As this abstract, thinking layer of the Internet develops and evolves, individuals gain in freedom of choice. And as they make more and more choices, they become ever more themselves.
About the images, top to bottom: the shadow of a utility pole against the neighboring apartment building at sunset, a cell phone credit company sign in rural Jamaica, twisted vines in rural Michigan, a section of a data visualization I made to illustrate the relationships between several dozen databases of customer information at Orbitz Worldwide.
Vote for my SXSW presentation at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/5683
I agree about the banana, but I’m not so sure about the arrow. Not everyone conceptualizes time as a relentless hurtling forward. Some cultures understand time as a fractal, a spiral, a mandala, or a cycle. We have body time, clock time, and Deep Time. Short-term orientation is the norm for some cultures; others emphasize investing for the future, patience and perseverance.
Visualizing temporality is a fundamental issue in interaction design today. Our beliefs about time and its passage profoundly affect the design of software and interactive media. It’s time for interaction designers to understand deeply how our customers know time, whether as an arrow, a spiral or a squiggle. How people slice and dice nature into concepts is fundamental to designing tools people can use to successfully live on the earth.
1. What is the shape of time?
As interaction designers, do we know what mental models our customers use to represent the experience of time?
Calendars, clocks and other models of time often are designed with the understanding that time is a forward-moving arrow, moving from a past moment when time began, to a future end of time.
Three arrows of time are described by theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. “First, there is the thermodynamic arrow of time, the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases. Then, there is the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future.
NASA diagram of the expanding universe
Finally, there is the cosmological arrow time. This is the direction of time in which the universe is expanding rather than contracting.”
It all sounds very logical, doesn’t it?
That is, it’s logical to the Western, English-speaking scientific mind. However, not everyone conceptualizes time as a relentless hurtling forward and onward?
There are some cultures which believe in a linear time, but as an arrow which rushes backwards toward us from the future. Business people may think of a calendar day as broken up into quarter-hour calendar chunks. I remember that when I was a child, my days were single seamless instants.
José Argüelles’ T’zolkin calendar
The ancient Mayans described time as an interlocking grid of precise intervals between states of being, diagramming this grid as a double helix. The interval between integers is the state of chaos, the matrix for creative activity.
Time has been described as being like a river. A river flows from a source, and at the mouth, it unites with a larger body of water, which eventually evaporates into clouds, from which fall rain, from which rivers form. So if time is like a river, it is both linear and cyclical, with recurring celebrations of Blue Mondays and Harvest moons, birthdays and wedding anniversaries, Beltaine and Christmas.
I grew up with clocks that told the story that time is round, but perhaps it is more like a spiral, because each time the hour hand revolves, we find ourselves in a new, entirely different day. Some believe in reincarnation, a theory which posits that people are reborn higher or lower on the spiral of life, according to one’s behavior.
The founder of the Foundation for the Law of Time, José Argüelles, has suggested that time could be viewed as a mandala, a “field of resonance” or a fractal. Metaphysician, ethnobotanist and art historian Terence McKenna pictured time as a “holographic medium” in which we are embedded like “biological oscillators”. Tielhard de Chardin, who was a French philosopher, Jesuit priest, paleontologist and geologist, spoke of the space/time continuum as having a “convergent nature”, with an “Omega point” of involution.
And some people understand time as boundary-less, with no moment of Creation and no end.
Me, at the tail end of an 18-hour flight, still one hour and fifteen minutes from home.
2. What’s the difference between local time and body time?
As interaction designers, how can we differentiate the personal experience of time from clock time?
Stephen Hawking has said that “…In the theory of relativity there is no unique absolute time, but instead each individual has his own personal measure of time that depends on where he is and how he is moving.” A person taking a long international trip is intensely concerned with specific local clock times and calendar dates, in order to catch planes, arrive at reserved hotel rooms, and rent cars at times when car rental locations are open. However, simultaneously, they are in a new kind of time – body time, which is the aggregate response of one’s own biology to the shifting temporal landscape of travel. For example, I remember arriving in Paris at “breakfast time” when my own body was desperately pleading for “bedtime”. No one will argue that the personal experience of time is highly subjective, and varies from culture to culture. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “… the clocks move separately from our authentic time.”
3. How can we make the time?
As architects of the experience of time, what raw materials do we have to work with?
We are creative beings. To create is to fundamentally transform raw materials, yielding random and unpredictable results. One of those raw materials we can transform is our perception of time – and our perception of time is all there is to time.
Writer and teacher Alice Bailey said, “…time is the sequence of events and of states of consciousness as registered by the physical brain. Where no physical brain exists, what humanity understands by time is nonexistent.” In other words, if a tree falls in the forest and there is no observation of its descent, it fell in no time. Time is a construct, so it doesn’t have an intrinsic shape. It only has the shape we assign it. As we learn to think and behave with more complexity, we give our time more fantastic shapes.
Time and space are dynamic — our choices and behaviors are the algorithms which determine the patterns which are generated.
International travelers at the Miami airport, 2009, making their own time
4. Have I been around long enough to know that you’re the one I want to go through time with?
How can we design interactive experiences of time which attract and engage?
Online travel aggregators such as Kayak, Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia, and post-booking travel planning sites like TripIt and Dopplr are exploring the best way represent different kinds of time. They are devising date pickers and time pickers. They are investigating ways to represent overall elapsed time, time between flights, flight time, time zone changes, probability of delay, trip segment time, depart/return time, preferred times, requested times, times that are in or out of company policy. Many other web applications, smartphone applications, games and other interactive media are also exploring the frontiers of time visualization.
With a web browser page, we are trapped in the Deep Present. In my industry, the idea is to cram as much functionality as possible into the web page, giving the visitor a bewildering variety of choices, keeping them immersed in your slice of time. Many software conventions have been invented to add depth and dimension to the present moment – dropdown and popup menus, tabbed or hierarchical menus, microcontent, popups, slideouts – but, in truth, everything you see is confined to the screen, and that screen is your Present. A Deep Present, but now, now, now. The past and the future cannot be reliably available the way they are with a book or any printed object, which are built in a left-to-right arrow-of-time manner. Books, in a very tangible way, give one simultaneous access to the present, the page I am reading; the past, the pages I have already read; and the future, which consists of pages I have not yet read.
Since screen real estate is limited, if we want to get the most bang for the buck out of the interactive experience, we must work to expand time for the user. This is a reasonable project.
The luscious twilight at Grandma and Grandpa’s farm in Ontario
When we were very young, and wanted to go out into the luscious twilight and play, a dinner hour could seem like an eternity. As an adult, that same span of time can fly while making love or having an intense conversation. The experience of time is relative, and variable according to the perceptions of the observer. This is a tool which can be played with by the interaction designer.
What makes a kid play with the same toy, over and over again?
5. Is this a good time?
Why should interaction designers turn their attention to the study of time visualization now?
We need to be thoughtful and conscious as we design the representation of time, for our beliefs about time and its passage profoundly affect the design of software and systems, interfaces and visual identity. What goes on in the window is, like spoken and written language, both a mirror of our Selves and deep shaper of our daily lives.
We have a recent example of inadequate attention to the issue of time in the field of software development. The Year 2000 problem, or “millennium bug”, was the result of inadequate attention to the issue of time, in the infancy of software development. As a result, data was trapped in two-digit date formats, and many were challenged convert to four-digit format before the end of 1999.
The representation of temporality is the fundamental issue in interaction design today. For example, one issue is how to design for both Eastern and Western audiences, who differ in the cultural trait described by Dutch anthropologist Geert Hofstede, the Long- versus Short-term Orientation. This trait describes to what extent the group invests for the future, is persevering, and is patient in waiting for results. China is said to lead this dimension, followed by Hong Kong and Taiwan. The United States is seventeenth.
As an interaction designer with an online travel company, I want to know how our customers think of time, whether as an arrow, a spiral or a squiggle. How people slice and dice nature into concepts is fundamental to designing tools people can use to successfully navigate our spinning earth.
The one-liner, “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” is by Groucho Marx, an American comedian who lived from 1890 to 1977.
The painting of the dripping watch is by Salvador Dali.
The poster at the top of this post is unattributed; if anyone knows the source, please let me know.
Most of the photos were taken by myself, and the one of me, disgruntled at the end of my trip to Jamaica last fall, was taken by my amused husband.
- What are the agents in a social learning network?
- What are the roles played by these agents?
- What are the interaction types they engage in?
- What are some structures of interaction?
- What design elements make the community palpable?
- What welcomes the newcomer?
- What sustains engagement?
- How can we measure engagement? Shared meaning? Cognitive play?
- What difference does it make when interactions are perceived as coming from peers, from authorities, or from the user interface itself?
- What makes a kid play with the same toy over and over again?
Or, here’s another way to phrase it:
- What is the structure of interactions between agents which result in ongoing engagement of the learners, the growing of shared meanings and playing with shared cognitive artifacts?
Interactions can be defined as the micro-events that occur between autonomous agents in processes that eventually result in a healthy agents and a healthy network. On the most basic level of life, autonomous organisms solve problems of encounters with the environment through mechanisms such as a selectively permeable membrane, a group of energy currencies such as those used for transport processes across a membrane, a set of catalysts responsible for modulating the rates at which reactions to the environment take place and mechanisms for stabilizing metabolism. More advanced adaptive interactions include motility, multicellular organization, and sensorimotor systems, leading to the development of the mind as a neurosomatic activity which establishes a sense of self in the environment.
Motility is the baseline for the appearance of cognition; in collaborative learning we should expect to see that a knowledge flow which is open and free is the baseline for the appearance of Surowiecki’s “wisdom of crowds” phenomenon. Online interactions are like non-terminating data processing algorithms, in that they are defined lists of instructions for completing tasks, but the length of the process cannot be determined in advance. If they are well designed, they extend our adaptive interactions in ways that allow us to move, use our senses to touch one another, and organize ourselves into complex systems.
It’s that kind of complex organization that provides a venue for self-realization. As our systems become more complex, they give us the opportunity for increasing individuation.
As de Chardin has said, “union differentiates.”
What learning is NOT:
Learning is not a process of acquiring facts. However, I used to think differently. Back in Hillsboro High School, when I used to “cram” for a test, I assumed that I could stuff a lot of facts into my head in a hurry, the night ahead of time. Then those facts would be mine and I could haul them out at appropriate times, for example, on the test the next day. This is the cognitive approach to learning, which assumes that the purpose of learning is the individual’s acquisition of “knowledge”, which is assumed to be an entity or static state. One might call it a the triumph of industrialism: the materialistic world view which reduces knowledge to a possession. Cognitivists view learning as a process of inputs, much as occurs in computer information processing, with knowledge stored in the database of short term memory, coded in symbolic mental models for long-term recall.
Neural network model, Museum of Science, Boston
What learning IS:
Learning is the structural evolution of the brain that occurs as we engage in the world
OK, so learning is NOT the process of acquiring anything. So what is it?
Much of my thinking about how people learn is founded on research on how learning comes from the structure and biology of the brain. These studies published in the past few decades in fields such as cognitive neuroscience, neurobiology, and neurophysiology, describe how memory traces are formed in the brain as a result of concrete experience, reflective observation, active testing and forming of abstract hypotheses.
According to this research, learning is a physiological process of growth of structures in the learner’s mind–growing new neural configurations as a response to being presented with new experiences.
The manifestation, as I understand it, of this physiological growth, is the evolution of structures of language, thought and reality (oooh, that’s the title of Benjamin Lee Whorf‘s fabulous book. Check it out!)
James Zull, professor of biology and biochemistry at Case Western Reserve, talks about this in his book, The Art of Changing the Brain. Knowledge is situated in the growing, evolving network configurations. Those neural configurations are activated in the future when presented with the same types of experiences, and apparently, they reconfigure and grow some more.
In the external world, outside the brain and out in the landscape of Earth, group learning is growing connections between networks. Learning occurs as learners engage in the experiences of practice and reflection, and as teachers, in whatever form, engage them in experiences of modeling and demonstrating.
As my 16-year-old son Zachary once remarked, “You can’t not learn when you’re doing something.”
