Interfaces on Trial 2.0
By Jonathan Band and Masanobu Katoh
March 2011
ISBN-10: 0-262-01500-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-262-01500-4

We live in an interoperable world. Computer hardware and software products from different manufacturers can exchange data within local networks and around the world using the Internet. The competition enabled by this compatibility between devices has led to fast-paced innovation and prices low enough to allow ordinary users to command extraordinary computing capacity.

In Interfaces on Trial 2.0, Jonathan Band and Masanobu Katoh investigate an often overlooked factor in the development of today’s interoperabilty: the evolution of copyright law. Because software is copyrightable, copyright law determines the rules for competition in the information technology industry. This book–a follow-up to Band and Katoh’s successful 1995 book Interfaces on Trial–examines the debates surrounding the use of copyright law to prevent competition and interoperability in the global software industry in the last fifteen years.

Band and Katoh are longtime advocates for interoperable devices but present a reasoned view of contentious issues related to interoperability issues in the United States, the European Union, and the Pacific Rim[. They discuss such topics as the protectability of interface specifications, the permissibility of reverse engineering (and legislative and executive endorsement of pro-interoperability case law), the interoperability exception to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the interoperability cases decided under it, the enforceability of contractural restrictions on reverse engineering;] and recent legal developments affecting the future of interoperability, including those related to open source-software and software patents.

About the Authors

Jonathan Band is an attorney who has written more than 100 articles on intellectual property and the Internet. He is an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Law Center.

Masanobu Katoh is the former head of the Law and Intellectual Property Unit of Fujitsu Limited, a global information technology company based in Japan.

You can purchase it at Amazon and other sellers, and also download a open access copy at MIT Press.

Beth Noveck of New York Law School argues for the development of a deliberative interface to “translate theoretical ideals about the goals of deliberation into…new media to enable individuals to participate in new and more effective social groups.” She presents a design heuristic to help ensure the values of deliberation are built into future interface designs – an excellent example of how values can be embedded in technology design.

Here are some stimulating passages from her keynote talk presented at the recent Stanford University Conference on Online Deliberation:

…as we move from face-to-face to on screen deliberative practices, we have not yet begun to understand this interplay between structures and action. We design our technologies based on outdated material assumptions about communicative practices. We define our communicative practices based on outdated assumptions about technology.

We tend to think about Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but not about the dynamic social interface for groups. In other words, deliberation is a group practice and we ought to be thinking about the impact of the technology on the group and its dynamics, rather than just on the individual. Instead of me and the screen, we need to understand us and the screen.

How does the screen change those implicit, normative, explicit and legal structures? What happens when we get together around the electronic hearth? How do we use the screen more effectively to enable the public exchange of reason?

I want to argue that we need to design the interface in ways that are:

More visual and designed in ways to strengthen the sense of the collective
More open to creating new groups with clear membership and culture
More oriented toward fostering participation in the group and making the opportunities for participation clear

By visual, I do not mean multimedia or video-based. While pictures can help, text, too, can strengthen the dynamics of collective action. What I am referring to is using the screen – and whatever tools we can invent – to make social structures manifest.

If we do not use the interface to become more self-reflexive and aware of group structures, we will continue to build community without building teams; we will create on-line spaces but not on-line deliberation.

Yahoo! Research Labs released a beta version of a new search tool called Yahoo! Mindset allowing users to filter results on an axis of “shopping” (i.e., commercial) vs “researching” (i.e., non-commercial) sources. From their site:

• Find the results you like.
• Sort the way you need.

A Yahoo! Research Labs demo that applies a new twist on search that uses machine learning technology to give you a choice: View Yahoo! Search results sorted according to whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources).

Given how search engines have become the “center of gravity” for information navigation and knowledge acquisition, this appears to be an important step towards giving users more control over their search results.

Korean and Finnish university researchers have conducted a new study into how cultural differences influence computer interface requirements, focusing on how Korean, Japanese, and Finnish people responded to different mobile data services and how those responses matched cultural aspects. The researchers designed their survey to rank people’s responses in four basic cultural dimensions: Uncertainty avoidance, or the effort people take to maintain predictability; context, or the amount of information needed to fully understand something; individualism vs. collectivism; and the proclivity to multitask.

The teams from Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea, and the University of Helsinki created 12 video clips of people in Japan, Korea, and Finland engaging in different mobile data services tasks. Different people from each of those countries were asked their opinions about the mobile data services, and then the responses were used to identify 52 main attributes of mobile data services, including speed, screen size, and line spacing.

When matched against the cultural dimensions, the researchers found Koreans to be more collectivist than the Japanese and Finns; Koreans preferred to know the most popular ringtone downloads, whereas the Japanese and Finns sought out ringtones that pleased themselves, for instance. Koreans and the Japanese shared other characteristics, such as avoiding uncertainty and requiring high context, but all the groups said streamlined processes were important. Read the full article here.

[via ACM News]

Today’s New York Times article “Your Internet Search Results, in the Round” features Grokker, the graphical search engine interface that presents results in a spatial map.

Currently, the major search engines have all limited displays to ranked lists of sites. The weakness of this method of displaying results is that few surfers ever go beyond the first page of results even when there may be thousands of related links to their query.

Groxis executives say that by showing categories instead of a ranking listing, searchers may uncover gold they would have otherwise missed.

For more on visual and spatial presentation of search engine results, see my posts here and here.

Insdie Google points to Lee Gomes’s article “Folders That Now Seem So Yesterday May Be Very Handy Tomorrow” in today’s The Wall Street Journal arguing that Google and others, revolutionizing individual computing by eliminating folders, are actually making things less useful, not more. Gomes admits that while folders and subfolders, arranged in a neat hierarchy, don’t work very well for the Web, they still contain utility when organizing e-mails or files on our own computer.

The money line is “Like a hammer seeing everything as a nail, Google seems to see everything as a problem to be solved by search.”

The counter-argument for this maintains the utilization of Google’s search interface allows you to find more or less anything on your hard drive without knowing the precise name or location, freeing us from what Tim Berners-Lee has described as the “straitjacket of hierarchical documentation systems.”

There’s a discussion at Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine about what term should be used to describe “blogs” (the assumption being, apparently, that “blogs” is too techie, or has a negative connotation, or something like that). Jeff has frequently used the term “citizens’ media,” but Bill Keller suggested perhaps “peoples’ media” is a better fit. Jeff’s current offering is Volksmedia: “I like that. It has a funky, retro, populist, Volkswagen feel, of course, with that buggy attitude.” An almost certain response was the connotation between “volks” and Hitler. So, toss that out.

I suggested in the comments that there’s no need to hold onto the “media” handle at all. Blogging doesn’t need to be defined as “something like the existing media, but of the people.” Naming it “citizens’ media” follows the common trend of naming a new technology in terms of the old (often by negating part of its original features): “horseless carraige” or “wireless.” Rather than thinking about how blogs can be related to traditional media, we should think about blogging’s unique formal features: connectivity, conversational, global, informational, and so on.

I would argue that blogs are information interfaces. Information interfaces are technologies for arranging, storing, displaying, retrieving and navigating information, ranging from scientific classification systems, encyclopedias, maps, library card catalogs, computer files sytems, graphical user interfaces, and web search engines. An information interface serves as a kind of translator, mediating between an information-space and the user, making one sensible to the other. An information interface is a necessary medium by which we gain knowledge. As such, an information interface plays a crucial role in not only the communication and representation of books in a collection, files on a hard drive or information on the web, but also in how we understand these information-spaces, and ultimately, the world around us.

While I typically equate information interfaces with file navigation systems, the idea can easily be extended to blogs. Blogs, especially when utilized in conjunction with tools such as RSS feeds and Technorati, represent a interface between users and information – bringing us into closer conversations, closer informational scrutiny, and closer apprehension of knowledge.

Blogs are an interface more than a medium; they bring people and ideas in contact with each other.

Is this a blog, a folkmedia? Or is it something more than the sum of its parts: a conversation, a space where information is shared & critiqued? “Infospace” “Idea-space”

(via Question Technology)
Ellen Ullman has a great op-ed in the New York Times today about computers and attention:

There are unused icons on your desktop”: this message sometimes appears in a balloon on the lower right-hand corner of my computer screen. I can’t imagine why I should be alerted to this fact. The condition of my personal workspace is my own business, as I see it. But no matter what I might be doing at the moment – writing, reading, coding, thinking or (God forbid) simply letting my thoughts trail off where they may – the designers of the Windows XP operating system seem to think I should stop right now and clean up my desk.

That is why I was surprised to read that Microsoft researchers now feel confident that they can figure out when it’s all right to interrupt me. According to the project director for something called the Attentional User Interface, the researchers believe they “can detect when users are available for communication, or when the user is in a state of flow.”

(via Slashdot)
The University of Southampton has launched a new semantic web interface, called mSpace, that it says will make searching for information online, and learning about a subject, much easier. They state:

mSpace is an interaction model to help explore relationships in information.

mSpace helps people build knowledge from exploring those relationships. mSpace does this by offering several powerful tools for organizing an information space to suit a person’s interest: slicing, sorting, swapping, infoViews and preview cues.

An mSpace presents several associated categories from an information space, and then lets users manipulate how many of these categories are presented and how they’re arranged. In this way, people can organize the information to suit their interests, while concurrently having available to them multiple other complementary paths through that information.

This is interesting work, and builds on one of my main criticisms of how we currently navigate information on the Web: through linear & hierarchical (not to mention textual) lists of keyword search results.

SphereXP is a 3D desktop anhancement for Microsoft Windows XP. In their words, it takes “the known concept of three-dimensional desktops to its own level. It offers a new way to organize objects on the desktop such as icons and applications.” Check the videos and screenshots to get the idea. [Servers seem to be down due to a Slashdot effect]

While I’m very much in favor of new interface designs that help us break from the strict hierarchy of a traditional file tree structure (which GUI doesn’t really accomplish), this solution seems more like eye candy than any paradigm shift. Reminds me, too, of Sun’s Project Looking Glass.