amy martin // thesis

Re: Fwd: Email

2010-03-24T14:46:00.000-07:00

So I'm working on a website for my thesis project: Re: Fwd: Email. The majority of thesis-related posts will happen there from now on. I'm not entirely sure, now, what to do with this section. It doesn't even really need to be an archive since I just ported my blog from here to there. Perhaps I will devote this page to cute pictures of animals. Or something. (Probably not).

Prototype: inbox Magazine

2010-02-20T04:21:00.000-08:00

Coming back from my week-long email vacation last year, I realized I had not missed anything important and that checking my email once a week would probably suffice. To that end, I started thinking about email as a weekly publication instead of an always on application. I took all of my emails from that week of December 1, 2009 through December 7, 2009, organized them and laid them out as a set of magazines.

The primary magazine contains the bulk of the emails and the addendum contains a handful of extremely long emails that would not fit into the page count of the first volume. This prototype demonstrates email in a completely different, more readable, less urgent context and although it’s not practical for mass consumption, it does highlight the one-directional, informational nature of many email messages.

Prototype: Bloom

2010-02-19T19:37:00.000-08:00

This piece involves moving an emergent function of email—task management—out of the inbox and into a physical object external to the computer. Drawing on the ideas of ubiquitous computing, this project focuses on combining an existing behavior, starring items in an inbox, with a familiar metaphor, the desktop plant.By endowing an everyday object with computing intelligence, this prototype tests the theory that moving seamlessly from the periphery to the center of attention eases technological overload. It also provides a calm, less judgemental display of task management. Ideally this would be a physically tactile and tangible plant, but in the face of the current constraints of botany, the task plant, Bloom, is presented as a digital prototype programmed in Processing and displayed on a touchscreen submonitor.

Bloom prototype in action. I am using a set of my own email for the week of December 1 - December 7.

Reply All

2010-02-19T12:54:00.001-08:00

I wonder if there is still time to find some way to integrate this kind of hilarious confusion into my thesis work. Data Underload # 8 - Unsolicited.

Google's Buzz

2010-02-10T21:49:00.001-08:00

So Google recently launched Buzz, a twitter/facebook-like application, inside of Gmail. The general response of people I know is confusion, irritation and skeptical experimentation. The addition of another folder quickly filling up with comments from friends of friends feels quite overwhelming at the moment and seems like the exact wrong thing to do (with email, I mean). For the time being I will let it sit and see how I feel about it later. I have to say, though, my gut says I don't have patience for yet another "tiny updates of no consequence" aggregator.

Postcards from the Web

2010-02-07T16:45:00.000-08:00

About twelve years ago, I maintained a website with a handful of regular readers. At some point, I was tired of talking to them via the web (and the occasional email although I've never been very good with responding in a timely manner), so I sent out my address and requested that people send me some postcards. Here are some of the ones I got.

I got around 15 in total from random, sometimes awesome internet strangers. I must have exchanged hundreds of personal emails over the last fifteen years and it doesn't really surprise me that this handful of postcards from strangers is what I've kept.

I was reading a blog post the other day about how digital service companies (such as Google) don't get nearly as much mythological brand cred as a company like Apple (a more physical company). I don't know if that's entirely true, but again, I'm not surprised that the author was suggesting physical items hold more resonance with us than digital ones.

I updated some structural elements of my website today to reflect that my thesis topic is no longer about attention (too broad). I didn't want to directly say it was about email either, though, because although it is, that is somewhat of a practicality. I can't help but wish that the things we spend hours doing are things that matter. My thesis doesn't really address this because that wouldn't be a design thesis. I really don't know what that would be.

Wow, Email is Annoying.

2009-12-08T14:02:00.000-08:00

A related aside: I'm coming up on approximately a year and a half of not listening to music. Not because I WANTED to, but largely because I had something like 80gbs of music at home and 80gbs of music at work. The logistics of combining these sets, checking for repeats (there's a lot) and then putting it all in one easily accessible place was beyond my grad school addled brain. In fact, my boyfriend got so tired of all my different hard drives and constant complaints about lack of space that he ended up buying me a new one. He then had to nearly bludgeon me into consolidating everything.
The difference is wonderful. I only plug one thing into my computer when I get home. Nearly all of my music is there and wow, I've missed it. How could I survive in this colorless bland, music-less world for so long? I don't know. I blame shiny new things like programming and microcontrollers and all that rapid learning.

Anyway, how does this relate to email? Well, I checked mine last night after a week of ignoring it. And not only was it overwhelming, it was BORING. I haven't tallied everything yet because even THAT is boring. It looks like most of it is from companies hoping to extract money from me. You can tell how happy I am about that. I missed two messages of semi-importance, neither with major consequences. (I didn't miss my chance to win a million dollars, of course).

So. The point here is that if everyone wrote really awesome songs and sent those to me instead of emails about carpet sales, I would be so much more engaged. As it stands, I am having a hard time caring about email, which is great because if I am to generate new ways we might communicate in the future, it's great to know that we really don't need what we think we need right now.

Day Seven - No Email

2009-12-07T13:28:00.000-08:00

So I have approximately eight hours before I check my email. Inside my mind, I've been collating the emails I need to send as soon as I can but there are only two--one family-related and one school-related. I'm kind of surprised but I suppose email is more often self-replicating than it is necessary communication.

That's pretty much it for now. I plan on counting the emails I received over the week in groups such as work, personal, mailing list and commercial (I'm assuming the majority of emails I get are commercial even though I never willingly sign up for those lists. I just buy a lot of things online and apparently companies feel that gives them the right to harass me once a week for the rest of my life) and I'd like to make a qualitative illustration about emotions over the week.

Although I'm looking forward to sorting through my inbox, I think I will miss not having to bother with it. That may change my personal email habits moving forward but regardless, I will probably conduct this experiment again in a few weeks with more quantified results (throwing a quarter into a jar every time I think of email, for example).

Day Six - No Email

2009-12-06T11:51:00.000-08:00

Today, some feelings of general panic. I had to send a file to Kinko's and it would've been easier to send it via email but because I could deliver it on a CD, I did that instead. Also, when I got to the laser cutter studio at school, I discovered that the computers tied to the laser cutters were infected with some "don't use a USB drive" virus. The work-around was to send the file to yourself in email and then grab it off the web from the laser cutter computer. Der. So if I really did not have email, I could've given the file to a friend to send to their email and have them retrieve it off the computer but that was too much of a pain in the ass so I logged into an email account that I never use and sent it from there.

I am beginning to feel somewhat anxious again although I'll be able to check my email tomorrow. My first thought when deciding to do this experiment (i.e., not use email) was that I would do it for a week. Then I thought that was too wimpy and so I should do it for the entire month of December. Then I chickened out and went back to a week, which I've decided is a good time frame for now.

Day Five - No Email

2009-12-05T12:05:00.000-08:00

So it's the weekend and the email urge, slightly satisfied on Thursday, hasn't really built up again. I'm assuming it will on Monday, but for now, I'm happy to work on holiday presents and drink my coffee.

In addition to the anxiety I was feeling a couple of days ago, I also felt and continue to feel fairly isolated. Delightfully, though, that feeling is turning into quiet. Though I tend to like my media forms very, very loud, I like the inside of my head to be emotionally quiet. Frees up my working memory for things like information and ideas and spontaneous fun-having.

Day Four - Some Email

2009-12-04T13:01:00.000-08:00

So does less than a minute of email scanning to make sure there was nothing affecting my work in my email count? Probably. I caved. A little bit.

Although I am glad I did because on my quick skim, I discovered one request for files and then another request for the same files a couple of days later.

Oops.

So I uploaded the files and sent a message via IM that they were uploaded--although I don't have the IM of the original file requester so I sent a message to the guy who sits a couple of people down from him. I'm no longer feeling anxiety about not checking my email since I saw everything in there and I was able to take care of things that seemed important. This brings me to another idea.

I still have not resumed regular visits to my inbox. That tiny crack yesterday, however, was enough to eradicate most of my anxiety. An idea for future exploration would be an inbox that you can see but not affect until some point in the future. I don't think this is a solution to anything because it is completely impractical (people want to do what they want to do when they want to do it), but it is something to consider. The primary feeling I've experienced so far with not checking my email is the worry that I'm missing something. A quick glance showed me what I did miss and then I continued on with the rest of my day worry-free.

So that's the negative part of this experiment-the anxiety. What is the positive part? I'm not sure yet. I don't feel particularly unburdened by not checking email. Or, I feel unburdened in general, but I think that's more a function of the semester end and the white noise maker completely drowning out my loud, early-rising neighbors (score!). I probably have more free time now that I'm not dealing with email, but I'm just filling that up with more reading of the internets. At any rate, I won't be resuming regular email behavior until next Monday so maybe something will come to me between now and then.

Day Three - No Email

2009-12-03T15:06:00.001-08:00

So I had my friend write an email for me last night, in response to a Craigslist ad because I was interested in purchasing some area rugs. I am very close to caving right now because I am worried that there is some kind of time-sensitive communique that will screw up something large if I do not respond to it. Maybe someone is stealing my identity? Maybe I won a million dollars and I have to respond within 5 business days or I'll forfeit the winnings? Maybe a professor is trying to get some information from me by next week?

This kind of feeling is incredibly uncomfortable. I may either give my account information to a trusted friend and have them look for anything important or I may just go in myself for a few moments to make sure there's nothing dire. Or not. At any rate, although I knew this before hand, I now have a visceral understanding of why telling people to use email less is never going to work (that is pretty much the point of the Tyranny of Email. It is a solid read full of good quotes but the solutions to email overload that the author are difficult to enact.)

Day Two - No Email

2009-12-02T10:20:00.000-08:00

Typically the first thing I do in the morning is check my email. Today I woke up thinking about how I'm not checking my email and whether or not I'm missing something. My guess is that I am not missing much but I miss it. I miss the habit. I also don't quite know what to do with my morning internet time now. It feels less personal--even though I almost never get personally relevant or poignant email anymore.

When I first started using email in college, I used it to talk with strangers on a mailing list about a book series (nerd) and I used it to write to random pen pals. I don't even remember how I found these people (or how they found me), but each email was a letter. It wasn't a one-liner or a request or a plan for future action. Each email did not have a purpose outside of itself. It was a joy to read and write, send and receive.

I haven't felt that in a few years. I maintained the habit of sending at least one letter via email every couple of weeks or so--usually to just one penpal because few people I know still enjoy letter writing. I'm not entirely sure why I stopped sending those letters, I just know I did.

It might be a function of graduate school. I have also stopped singing in the car which I fully blame on grad school depriving me of time to enjoy music. But whatever the reason, email is now utilitarian, dry, uninspiring. So no, I don't think I'm missing anything by not checking my email, but I definitely feel I've lost something I used to have.

Day One - No Email

2009-12-01T08:26:00.000-08:00

My final thesis topic is this--more or less. I will use explorative design and prototyping to generate speculative future perspectives on email overload. By this I mean I'm not redesigning an email client. There are more than enough people working on that. Rather, I am considering what email might look like further down the road. Or how we might view email differently. I haven't decided I need to be right, just different and interesting, which is hard enough in and of itself.

So, to that end, I am undertaking a series of experiments. For example, starting this week I am not checking my email at all. This is not because I think the solution to email overload is stop using it. But because I want to see how I, personally, deal with not having email. My last check was Monday night at 10:30 or so and I am already feeling anxious. I just remembered I was trying to schedule a few interviews about my thesis topic with people over email. Oops. Hopefully I can figure it out next week. In the meantime I am recording how I feel and how I do things, starting now.

12.01.2009
8:30 AM - Stumbled out of bed to look up white noise makers on Amazon because my neighbors have been banging around for the last hour. I can buy but I won't know when things are shipped. I suppose that's okay. I'm sure I'll forget about it and it will be a surprise.
8:45 AM - Checking library record. I've got some overdue books. The library usually sends out an email with this information but maybe it's sitting in my inbox right now.
9:00 AM - Feeling slightly anxious but I can't tell if that's just normal anxiety. Otherwise, feeling mostly normal and finishing up my thesis prospectus.
10:00 AM - I have been messing around with a Chumby lately and I forgot that I had it set up to check my gmail. So I accidentally saw some of my emails. The only subject header I actually read (again, accidentally) was from Amazon, about my recent purchase. But now I'm wondering if I have anything else set to push my email like that.
11:49 AM - Habit noticed. I keep ritually flipping to my browser every half hour or so to look for parentheses in my Gmail tab. Of course I don't realize I'm doing it until I'm staring at the browser thinking "why did I flip here." Weird.

Email Visualizations

2009-10-14T13:07:00.000-07:00

I don't have any yet, but that's one of about a bajillion places I'm starting with in my investigations for my thesis. Email is a deeply researched topic. On the one hand, that is fantastic because there's a huge amount of data to pull from. On the other hand, it's daunting. A few hours of basic research led to sixty relevant and/or interesting articles... many from academia or the internal research groups of large corporations. It's great that all this work is done but it also makes me wonder about my ability to contribute to it.

I can, however, live with that low-level anxiety and live with the aftermath if I don't contribute anything mind-blowing. What I wanted to talk about specifically was all the kinds of email data visualizations that people have come up with. The primary ones that I knew about before going into this project are Christopher Baker's personal email map and the visualization aspects of Remail. I get those, what they're doing and why, but I can't replicate them. Nor can I replicate them with my own data.

So. Quickly searching for "gmail api" brought me to mail trends. I started it half an hour ago and it's still processing all my gmail. I have 55,783 messages. I'm not entirely sure when I started using gmail exclusively for everything but I certainly have not used it since I started using email in 1995. I remember a time when nearly all my email was directed to me personally and almost entirely from strangers. It was also on a pc and maybe in Eudora. Or maybe it was in Pine, sorted with procmail. A handful of Elm messages from University. I wonder what my total number of emails sent and received would be. 100,000? 500,000? Strange and unfathomable.

Attention leads to Mail

2009-09-30T21:16:00.000-07:00

Sort of? So I've been waist deep in school work for the past month and both my reading lists and thesis topic have changed and morphed. What I was previously calling attention is really information overload and I have settled on email as the channel to examine.

More as it begins to coalesce.

Animation exploration

2009-09-09T12:07:00.000-07:00

A visual description of what I'm thinking about for my thesis. Sort of.

Information Suffocation from Amy Martin on Vimeo.

An Utter Lack of Things

2009-09-02T09:33:00.000-07:00

My bedroom is sparse. It contains a bed, two small, plain bedside tables, two other very plain tables and a coat rack. It is also my favorite room in my apartment. It is a simple room and because of this I'm able to keep the room very tidy. Because I can easily keep the room tidy, the space itself can breathe in a way that my other spaces do not or can not. Although simplicity (or minimalism in how I'm thinking of it–a lack of brick-a-brack and possessions) isn't always so easy or possible, it's how I best enjoy my personal space. So simplicity in this sense is purely an aesthetic choice. In my thesis project, however, this is not the case.

Simplicity, I intuit, is a necessity. I could be wrong as I feel I haven't done enough research (and will likely always feel that way) but I find resonance in the idea that too much information erodes attention.

We presented our nascent thesis ideas today and it was pointed out to me that the reasons for choosing simplicity as a goal were unclear. It isn't exactly that simplicity itself is the goal but rather, the goal is attentive focus through whatever means exist or can be invented... or barring full focus, the lack of distraction. That being said I don't *think* it will be too difficult to draw a line between simplicity and deeper focus. And in that light, I think I should rewrite the above sentence to say that I find resonance in the idea that too much information from too many sources erodes attention.

UPDATE: I dreamt about this topic last night (of course, my dreams have turned from the Wikipedia randomness of the summer to school stress) and I think even using the word "simplicity" is inaccurate. What I think I really mean is clarity and simplicity might be one strategy for achieving clarity. The best visualizations, for example, do not remotely approach simple but are always very clear.

I also had a dream that I cursed all the way through my thesis presentation so I should work on NOT doing that so much.

Reading List

2009-08-28T16:22:00.000-07:00

So I planned on reading a ton of books this summer... or at least 11. I gave a crack at 4 and barely opened the other 7, but here they are, in glorious alphabetical order (which unfortunately means the bitchiest sounding book is first):
Bauerlein, Mark. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30). New York: Tarcher, 2008.

Beck, John C., and Thomas H. Davenport. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. New York: Harvard Business School Press, 2002.

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (October Books). London: The Mit Press, 2001.

Gallagher, Winifred. Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.

Jackson, Maggie. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009.

James, William. "The Principles of Psychology ." Classics in the History of Psychology. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/index.htm (accessed August 25, 2009).

Klein, Naomi. No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs. New York, NY: Picador, 2002.

Lanham, Richard A.. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology). Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

Meyer, David E. Attention and Performance. Volume XIV.. London: The Mit Press, 1993.

Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 1986.

Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Electronic Culture: History, Theory, and Practice). London: The Mit Press, 2008.

While I've complained enough about Rapt, I've also dived into Suspensions of Perception, one of the attention economy books, a bit of the William James and a crack of Attention and Performance, largest book ever.

We were also tasked with writing a little introduction to what we're thinking about for our theses so I'll post that here. It's rough but it's as good as introduction as I'm going to write today.

The direction for my thesis work is attention and the lack of space within the context of media and information overload. Attention as a subject has changed dramatically since the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution. In recent years there has been a near explosion in media types and new technologies. I find, however, that these new media and technologies do very little to simplify existence or create space–something I find lacking in current society. Tech seems to over-complicate, fracture and otherwise indefinitely distract people. By researching attention from both a theoretical/philosophical standpoint and from a scientific/technical standpoint I hope to find ways to use current technology to alleviate the strain of media. In very simple terms I want to take what people are discovering about cognitive science and attention and use it to design, redesign or make obsolete a current time-consuming system. Right now I am thinking of language-based multitasking and what kinds of verbal tasks might be otherwise directed in tactile tasks, the kinds of things your muscles learn to do. This could, however, change with more research. The desired result of such a project is to help create space in one’s life.

I wrote a couple more lines but this is the majority. Also, I'm vaguely referring to my thoughts on tangible computing in the second to last line but only because I really have not researched anything enough to know how useful sorting email with one's fingers would actually be. Would it be anything other than novel to have, say, an email bracelet that changed texture when you got a new email so you could effectively ignore spams, mailing list emails and bulk mail while paying attention to personal letters and whatnot? I don't know. It might be cool but it could be totally useless or worse, complicate an already complicated and irritating system.

Tangible Computing Part II

2009-08-17T01:23:00.000-07:00

Over dinner with friends the subject of notch codes and what the hell they are came up. It took some late night html wrangling for my brain to put our conversation together with my earlier random dream about sorting email with one's hands. (Although I realize that the idea puts another step between the human and the communication and that's possibly not a useful direction to take, I'm still intrigued by the idea... at least I am at 2am.) So, notch codes are cut outs in sheet film that are standardized for different kinds of film and that help one tell which side of the film is the emulsion side. Cutouts are used because you develop film in the dark (of course) and so can't use your eyes. I wonder how fast photographers could sort through their film (although I don't think the system was developed for speed) and if notch code knowledge could possibly be stored in tactile memory (if such a thing exists... I really need to get on those psych research books).

Relink: A short manifesto on the future of attention

2009-08-13T12:36:00.000-07:00

A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention. What does it say? I don't know. I'm working and haven't had time to read it yet, but I need to keep note of these things so that when I do have time, I remember what I was (ha) supposed to be paying attention too. More links include Gauging Your Distraction, The Brain: Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State, Chris and Malcolm are Both Wrong (not sure if this is relevant or not), Attention Literacy, The Myth of Multitasking, The Psychology of Attention and People with Lots of Working Memory are not Easily Distracted. Speaking of distraction, I smell french fries. Yum.

Tangible Computing

2009-08-12T09:07:00.000-07:00

So I know very little about this tangible computing beyond the marble answering machine and, like, those gizmos in Minority Report. I woke up this morning with an idea in my head about how one could go through one's morning emails by sorting them manually, as in with one's hands. The general thought is that there would either be some kind of device or some kind of interface (gloves perhaps) that simulated device. Certain emails would have certain contours. Something that was sent directly to me and no one else by someone other than a company (an individual) would feel larger or weigh more, perhaps than random almost-spams from, like, Office Depot. There might be some kind of punch-out mechanism that would mimic labeling or starring.

Would this make going through email easier? I'm not sure. I don't really have a problem going through email in the first place but it might make it easier to go through email and, say, listen to the news at the same time. The idea of porting different activities that require (or pretend to require) visual attention to other senses appeals to me, so although I have not delved as deeply into my reading list as I would've liked this summer, this is the direction I'm most interested in at the moment.

More Rapt by Winifred Gallagher

2009-07-14T14:07:00.000-07:00

The further I get into this book, the more it feels like I'm reading self-help. While it seems to be a very well-researched book–every other paragraph mentions research by person X at institution Y doing Z things–there isn't much discussion of the experiments beyond a sentence or two, there are no references or footnotes–which I often enjoy reading more than the textthemselves–and there's no discussion of how the experiments were performed. Basically the book so far has told me "hey, scientists say if you spend your time focusing on being happy, you'll be happier." It's a great sentiment but at this point only my stubborn distaste for quitting is preventing me from dropping the book entirely.

I am, however, really looking forward to random books I've picked up like Suspensions of Perception by Jonathan Crary and of course I really should've started my research with The Principles of Psychology by William James.

This Post is Just a Test

2009-07-08T09:23:00.001-07:00

And yet there's no reason to let it waste. I am currently reading Rapt by Winifred Gallagher. It is not as research and science heavy as I would like it to be but it's... fun, so far. It remains to be seen if there will be anything in here that is of much use to my thesis. Still, it's fun to know that LSD helps remove a person's ability to sort and prioritize their attention so all the information about their environment is slamming them in the face at once. Heh.