Digital carvings: Brand totems for the emergence of infocentricity

Design Management Journal, Winter 2003 by Lucas, Bill, Higgins, Michael

STRATEGY

What is the future of digital branding? Bill Lucas and Michael Higgins propose a scenario of digital "totems." These carefully crafted cyber-carvings emerge from an innovative interface paradigm. They tell stories-about companies, about brands, about products. They have multidimensional personalities-from mechanical to charming to ethereal. They encourage consumers to access, exchange, manipulate and personalize information. It is an experimental system with fascinating and powerful potential.

In 1989, a band of colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, crossed the Monongahela River and settled on its south shore. They named their tribe MAYA and pioneered an interdisciplinary approach to product-design consulting. Through synergistic services to commercial and government clients (figure 1), the company blazed new trails throughout the technology wilderness. In addition to serving as

a scout for Digital Equipment Corporation, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), and many others, MAYA made numerous independent discoveries.

Among the MAYAn innovations is a new interface paradigm-an "information-centric" approach to the presentation of information. The approach was initially prototyped in a 1990s effort, code-named Visage.1 In the new model, displays are arrangements of elements that can be broken apart by users and directly manipulated, giving people the sense of "getting their hands on the data." The approach empowers people to perform actions directly that would traditionally require extensive knowledge of numerous specialized interface features.

No matter how you slice it, the concept of infocentricity will result in a new consumer experience-one in which the role of designer will be central. The most recent prototype, codenamed Renex, represents a turn toward use outside the lab-moving from pure R&D for specialized domains to a community of earliest adopters for more general use. This pre-commercialization design phase offers

many unique incubation opportunities, among them the promise of a new way to create brand identities.

Human-computer interaction

The development of infocentricity can be seen as part of a long progression in the history of computing. The large-scale trend has been toward greater decentralization and greater personalization of the computing experience. The first computers were special-purpose devices, hard-wired for a particular program. General programmability was the first revolution of computing, making a single machine capable of doing any task. Following the invention of the transistor, computers got smaller and faster. Eventually, they became networked, which spread computing chores across many machines.

As these technical feats were accomplished, similar developments in human-computer interaction (HCI) were making the machines more accessible to people. Perhaps the first watershed was the development of the high-level programming language. Time-sharing and job-control languages followed, which allowed machine resources to be efficiently used by many people. Then, in April 1973, the Alto computer was completed at Xerox Corp.'s PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). The Alto represented a revolutionary departure from the prevailing command-line HCI style and paved the way for a dramatically different relationship between people and information technologies. Personal computers hit the mass market, and user-friendly made its way into Merriam-Webster's dictionary.

The Alto was the first system to pull together the fundamental elements of the modern graphical user interface. Approximately 10 years later, Apple introduced the Lisa. It featured basically the same combination of interface ideas as the Alto: Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers (WIMP). Over the years, Microsoft and others followed suit with slightly different varieties. Contemporary interfaces are more colorful, include improved typography, and take advantage of bigger screens with higher resolutions. However, with the exception of a few new widgets, they are all essentially the same as they were 20 years ago. Although we have seen technical improvements rivaling those of the early days of computing-most notably the rise of the Internet-we have not reached another Alto-like moment in human-computer interaction.

Indeed, the WIMP interface is such a strong mainstream mainstay that many people have trouble imagining other models. Alternatives such as speech recognition, touch devices, eye-- movement detection, and new 3-D visual models are all being explored in earnest, but as yet, none has been designed or executed in a systematic manner that is sufficiently conducive to broad use. Populist adoption of inventive interfaces requires learning new paradigms. Since doing so is both a personal and a business investment, it is very likely that future interfaces will include all or part of the WIMP approach.,

In some ways, MAYA's infocentric software is an example of one such transitional form. It is not centered on competing head-to-head with existing WIMP-style operating systems. In fact, it currently works within a window of its own across many computer platforms. Like the WIMP, it utilizes pointer devices and has a form of pop-up menus. At the same time, MAYAs patented approach is a radically different environment. It is designed to go well beyond service as a novel, isolated desktop program and to begin to fully take advantage of the networked, connected computing universe we now occupy.