Dust or Magic, Creative Work in the Digital Age

326 Pages·2007·18.79 MB·English

by  Bob Hughes

Dust or Magic
Bob Hughes
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Bristol, England, UK
Bosko Books
Bosko Books publishes books and digital resources relating to design for use, new media and
information technology, www.boskobooks.com
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This edition published 2007 by Bosko Books.
Copyright 2007 Bosko Books, PO Box 1173, Bristol, BS39 4WZ
The right of Bob Hughes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ment of this book by such owners.
ISBN: 0-9547239-5-3
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in Minion llpt.
III
About the 2007 edition of ‘Dust or Magic’
Apart from its new preface, this edition of Dust or Magic is essentially the
same as the original one, which was published by Addison Wesley in 2000. The
main differences are that it’s a lot more affordable, thanks to the efforts of Lon
Barfield and Pete Maxwell at Bosko Books, and to the magic of e-publishing
and print-on-demand. We think it also has a more satisfactory subtitle.
The old subtitle, Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design, made everyone
cringe, apart from the all-powerful marketing people at Pearsons (who own
Addison Wesley). And it has a few long-overdue acknowledgements, and
some small updates:
I particularly need to thank Steve Temblett (my editor, subsequently
chief editor, at Addison Wesley) for being a rock of reassurance during the
harrowing process of getting the first edition home and dry, and then for
coming up with the inspired title, Dust or Magic. John Cato gave me lots of
kind encouragement and the free use of his office while I was writing it. Chris
McEvoy has been a great support - and he deserves special thanks for giving
Jakob Nielsen a dose of his own metrics at www.usabilitymustdie.com. And
enormous thanks to Lon and Pete for their help with getting this edition to
you, and to Teresa Hayter for putting up with it all.
Dust or Magics coverage of our industry stops at about 1998, and there are
so many things that I could update, the book would need to multiply in size
to accommodate them. And I would need several parallel lives to write them.
Instead, with apologies, I’ll limit myself to just a few items:
If you’re interested in Interactive Fiction (Adventure-type games,
mentioned in Chapter 1.5) do take a look at Inform: a complete, free, object-
oriented language that runs on all machines. It even comes with a big,
wonderful manual (also free). It is the work of Oxford mathematician and
poet Graham Nelson: www.gnelson.demon.co.uk. Nick Montfort has written
a fascinating, hugely readable book about this genre called Twisty Little Pas­
sages1, which includes the fruit of extensive interviews with the key people
responsible for the genre - including Graham Nelson himself (famous for his
elusiveness).
The wonderful Theodor Holm (Ted) Nelson is also in Oxford at the time
of writing, where he holds a fellowship at the Oxford Internet Institute. His
latest major development is ZigZag - a system for associating data in as many
dimensions as you like, and it really does work. He also has a fully working
system for performing Transclusion’ on the web, TransLit, all of which builds
up into a very robust alternative computer universe’ called Floating World.
IV
And on the subject of Nelsons, the anecdote in the introduction about the
triggers on HMS Victory aroused quite a bit of interest, so I did a bit more
research. It’s quite a story but the main figure, I think, is a mathematician
called Benjamin Robins (a friend of the admiral and explorer George Anson).
More on this in an oldish book called Guns at Sea by Peter Padfield.2
HyperCard (referred to frequently in Dust or Magic) now has a marvellous,
fully cross-platform workalike called Runtime Revolution. It’s the product
many of us dreamed of ten years ago. See www.runrev.com. Brian Thomas
(Chapter 2.1) has used it to re-release his If Monks had Macs.
Bob Stein has brought many of the Voyager CD -ROM titles mentioned in
Chapter 2.2 back onto the market again - see www.bringyourbrain.com. (This
is in addition to the ones Aleen Stein continues to publish under the Organa
name: www.organa.com).
As I speculated in Chapter 3.7, ‘trauma is in a major sense the opposite
of ‘story’. Indeed, that’s largely the basis of psychotherapy. This is a theme in
Joe Lambert’s excellent, recently-published Digital Storytelling - capturing
lives, creating community3, available via www.storycenter.org... and for a full
account see Judith Lewis Herman’s Trauma and Recovery4.
Finally, posthumous thanks and apologies to the late Jef Raskin. He
should have figured very prominently in Dust or Magic, but I am ashamed to
say that I didn’t know anything about him until his book The Humane Inter­
face5 appeared. (Actually, that’s not quite true - I’d read something about
his Swyftware system around 1988, but it seemed so ridiculously simple and
powerful that I began to think I’d dreamed it - until the book came out.)
My coverage of the Apple Macintosh story and human-computer interface
design would have been much stronger if I’d known about Jef when I was
writing Dust or Magic.
V
Contents
Preface.............................................................................. . . . VII
Section 1: ‘Cyberia’
Introduction: The Emancipation of the Serfs .................................... .....1
1.1 The computer as a ‘medium’....................................................... . ... 11
1.2 The computer as a landscape....................................................... . ... 15
1.3 Cyberia’s geological past........................................................... . ... 23
1.4 Bush, Engelbart, Nelson, and the Quest for Xanadu............................. . ... 29
1.5 Early explorations: From ‘timesharing’ to the Personal Computer............ . ... 45
1.6 The beginnings of a mass medium: Interactive Video........................... . ... 53
1.7 From the Mac to the Seedy ROM................................................. . ... 59
Section 2: Eminent Cyberians
Introduction: “Tomorrow’s establishment is today’s lunatic fringe”........... . ... 75
7.1 Voices from nowhere............................................................... 79
2.2 Voyager: Cyberia’s first viable community........................................ . ... 99
2.3 The power of‘primary evidence’: Curtis Wong develops the Voyager vision . .. . . 119
2.4 The ‘book as hero’ in Romain Victor-Pujebet’s “Le Livre de Lulu”................ . 127
2.5 The Nationwide Building Society, and its ‘Interact’ project.................... . . . 135
Section 3: Working in Cyberia
Introduction: Do we really have to ‘get real’?..................................... . . . 149
3.1 Crying all the way to the bank: Microsoft’s “Sendak” saga...................... . . . 151
3.2 Get yourself a theory, and make it a good one.................................... . . . 157
3.3 Audience: Who are you making this for - and where are you taking them? . . .. . . 163
3.4 Emotion, interaction, participation, carnival.................................... . . . 177
3.5 ‘Cognitive dynamite’: multi-sensory effects that blow you away............... . . . 189
3.6 ‘Cognitive train-wrecks’ and ‘user expectations’................................. . . . 201
3.7 Storyspace: from the path to the landscape itself................................. . . . 211
3.8 Working in Cyberia: from storyspace to the real world........................... . 227
3.9 Trust, and the paradox of self-absorbed work.................................... . . . 249
3.10 Conclusion: rediscovering workmanship......................................... .. . 255
Notes................................................................................. 7.61
Bibliography......................................................................... . . . 279
Index................................................................................. . . . 293
VI
PREFACE
No more books about creativity, thanks;
just a world where it is possible
The lesson that emerges, far too cautiously, from Dust or Magic, is that we are
in the middle of an undeclared war over what Norbert Wiener called “The
human use of human beings”.
Since the book came out in late 1999 I’ve been able to meet and discuss
working life with far more people, far more candidly than I ever could do
before, and there is no question about it: this is war! On the one hand, we
have the people who do the work. We have our own, personal experiences
and beliefs about how we work best, which are all amazingly similar and are
confirmed now by mountains of the most conclusive research imaginable.
Our experiences, and the research, show unequivocally that we do our best
work when were not feeling threatened or harassed, and are in control of our
jobs and lives.
On the other hand, we have the system: capitalism and its latest human
manifestation, managerialism. Workers of all kinds are being subjected to
more and more control and monitoring, exposed more and more to arbitrary
inspection and challenge, required more and more to account not only for
their actions but also for their proposed actions and even for their feelings
about their jobs: employers increasingly require you to hold sincere, positive
feelings toward them and to their customers.
This applies to all workers; i.e. people who actually do something for their
living, almost irrespective of salary (although the poorest-paid are in general
the most monitored). Increasingly, computers are the means whereby the
regime is enforced. This system, whose watchword is ‘excellence’, seems to
have been designed to make good work almost (but not quite) impossible.
The system, it should be said, needs good stuff and does not actually
object to it per se. What it really objects to is the situations in which good
stuff is produced: situations where people feel secure, valued, and in control.
These are precisely the situations where the system’s writ does not run, and
they are anathema to it. So the good stuff people do is overwhelmingly done
despite the system, in the teeth of its opposition, and in overlooked nooks
and crannies of human decency and respect. For anyone who wants to spend
viii Preface
their life doing good stuff, this is an important thing to grasp - because until
you grasp it you are apt to blame yourself unnecessarily for your failures.
And the system will encourage you to do this. It tells you that “you can make
it if you try” and you tend to believe it, even when common-sense tells you it
is a barefaced lie: we cannot all play for Manchester United, or be President
of the United States, or beautiful, simply by ‘trying’. So if you want to do good
stuff, the first thing you must do is distinguish situations that permit it from
ones that don’t, and try to find ways of turning the ones that don’t into ones
that do. You can’t do this without action that’s to some extent political, and
based on solidarity: things that the system abhors and which it has developed
a rich array of techniques for discouraging.
The most effective of these techniques is a special kind of division of
labour, whereby the most dangerous members of the workforce are separated
from their fellows by special favours and titles. Thus you, who read this,
are perhaps called ‘creative’ by your bosses, and allowed to wear your own
clothes to work. Your work will be done in a different and curiously hallowed
part of the building, maybe slightly less intensely monitored than other peo­
ple’s, and there will be strong hints that you may at some point enjoy hugely
better rewards than the other workers do. You may even have a bar-football
machine in the office (but also a strange inhibition about actually using it).
It will also be assumed that, because you are so very different from other
workers, you scorn the idea of joining a trade union, and are entirely happy
to work whole weekends of unpaid overtime, and even brag about it. ‘Creativ­
ity’ has become the new methodism - an ideology that perverts workers into
embracing their own humiliation.
Computers are all about control - but of what, by whom? They are rou­
tinely described as ‘revolutionary’ and their literature is full of talk about
‘human values’ and ‘human-centered design’. Computers are certainly
permeating and affecting human life all over the planet. But what is the
‘computer-revolutionary agenda’ and who, if anyone, is writing it? What
great visions do we have, about life after a computer revolution?
Ben Shneiderman is justly considered one of the great names in Human-
Computer Interface design but his recent book, Leonardo’s Laptop6 worries
me. He starts off by declaring that “7he time is right for the high tech world to
attend more closely to the needs of humanity.” Absolutely! But he then unfolds
a vision of computer use that sounds to me very much like old-fashioned
Victorian colonialism, with knobs on. His future-world seems to be a sort
of sweetshop staffed by obliging, good-humoured foreigners. Has he got
‘humanity’ confused with ‘customer’? When you travel, he predicts, ‘human­
ity’ will be able to choose “local guides whom you hire for their colorful