Bill Gaver

How would you describe the long-term goal of your work?

Our work involves design as an approach to understanding and improving the ways we live with technologies. As my colleague Ben Hooker puts it, we want to help people not just to live, but to live well with technology.

This means that we are interested in new technologies, of course, and the ways we can play with them, craft them, and embed them in our lives. But equally, our research is about what it means to be human, and our designs are both a tool for developing that understanding and a way of expressing it.

What are your research plans for the near future?

We are pursuing a number of projects. As part of the Equator IRC (www.equator.ac.uk), we are developing what we call the Curious Home. In terms of experience, we want to encourage people to find new meanings within and across the boundaries of their homes. In terms of design, we want to go beyond unitary, self-contained devices to allow a given product or set of products to be dispersed within the home. In terms of technology, we are working with partners from the University of Nottingham to use an infrastructure toolkit they’ve developed, partners from Bristol to use ultrasonic location sensing, colleagues from Munich to work with small display screens, and so on. The overall intention is to build on work we’ve already done to show how technology can support exploration, reflection, and interpretation in the home.

We’re also starting a related project with support from Intel and collaboration with Phoebe Senger’s group at Cornell University. For this project, we’re looking for ways to sense indirect indications of people’s well-being at home that can be displayed to inhabitants in ways that will promote their own reflection and interpretation. The intention is not to create a system that knows precisely about people’s emotions or that uses biometric data (we are skeptical about the possibility of the first and desirability of the second), much less one that acts on the basis of such knowledge. Instead, we want to encourage new perspectives and views of the home – as with much of what we’re doing right now, we want to use technology to create situations that amplify, alter, or add new dimensions to people’s existing experiences, and then offer them to people to see what they make of them.

Another strand of our work looks at the interplay between the electronic and physical dimensions of public spaces. This is work being pursued by Ben Hooker and his colleagues within the department. For instance, we’re starting field trials of electronic pollution signage that bluejacks passsersby with information about local pollution levels. This comes from a body of work that Ben has been developing that emphasises the degree to which the city has electronic as well as physical dimensionality, and explores how people might negotiate these complex landscapes. We’re hoping to take this research forward in a couple of other projects as well. For instance, one that we are hoping to pursue with our long-term collaborators at Hewlett Packard’s Research Laboratory in Bristol looks at how people might be able to maintain connections with cultural attractions they’ve visited.

How do you move from one piece of work to another? Intuitively? Does there tend to be an obvious "next step"? To what extent does funding influence those decisions?

Every time we do a piece of work, it helps us understand some things, but opens many other possibilities and questions. This doesn’t determine next steps in any obvious way – nothing we do is obvious, at least not to me – but it does give us an overall direction or trajectory. At the same time, we’re inspired by things we find along the way, like other research, work we see at exhibitions, articles in the news, or just things we notice in our daily lives. All of this feeds into the ideas we have for future work.

We’re wholly dependent on external funding to pursue our work (take note, potential benefactors!), so of course this influences us if only by allowing some lines to proceed while others wait. But I don’t see this as compromising our work too badly. Typically we have a lot of things we might want to do, and when a funding opportunity comes along we work to find and articulate an overlapping set of interests. That process of articulation is similar to what we have to do to communicate our research anyway.

Do you view your output primarily in terms of articles or artefacts? What are the main channels for making your ideas available within and outside the community?

Some of each, really. For instance, one of our most successful pieces lately is the Drift Table, an electronic coffee table that allows you to slowly move over aerial views of England and Wales. We’ve published a paper about the piece and the ideas behind it at CHI, and it won a couple of awards at the DIS design competition. It’s been in an exhibition in Basel, and we’re hoping to have it in two or three other major exhibitions in the UK and Germany. It has a surprising presence on the web, where a number of bloggers have picked up on it and are busy discussing how to do it better. I’ve described it in lectures to a variety of audiences here in the UK, in Europe, and in the US. And it’s been reported in the design press, and appeared on the Discovery Channel.

So we do everything we can to get our work out there, in front of other researchers, relevant companies, and the general public. But the fundamental thing, as far as I’m concerned, is not only to promote the particular designs themselves, but the way they embody an approach to design and a perspective on electronic products. That’s what we’d really like to communicate.

Are there any directions your work could take that haven't been explored yet? Any groups you'd like to collaborate with that you haven't worked with so far?

Of course (can you imagine me saying ‘no, we’re done now’?). There’s any number of ways that we’d like to take our current work forward, and there’s new areas I’d love to open. For instance, I’ve got a three-year-old, and I’d love to work on technologies for little kids – I think that’s a really difficult area because it’s easy to do stuff they’d like, but quite difficult to do things that aren’t appalling aesthetically and ethically. But that’s just one example. Designing for temporary communities – buses, pubs, hotels, airports is another area I’d like to explore. I’d love to work with applications for robotics in everyday life. And to get more involved with telecommunications companies, or transportation, or furniture makers, or florists. And groups – there’s any number of interesting groups that I’d love to work with if we could make the opportunity. Where do I start?

Do you envisage a world where objects have been replaced by artefacts? What would such a world be like, and what would it offer?

I’m not sure what you mean by that – perhaps that ‘normal’ objects might be replaced by ‘augmented’ artifacts. Do I envisage such a world – and do I like the idea? Not really. There are lots of opportunities for technology to make life easier on the one hand, and to intervene and complicate and offer new perspectives on the other. But I don’t want every aspect of my life to involve technology, and I don’t want all the things I use to be ‘smart’ or ‘aware’ or whatever. To borrow from Freud – and this probably works at several levels, unfortunately – sometimes a cigar should only be a cigar.

My relationship with technology is somewhat ambivalent. For instance, I don’t even own a mobile phone. Some of my younger colleagues seem more relaxed about everything having an electronic or computational dimension. For instance, they navigate the complex social world of mobile telephony – being able to reject calls, find out who dialed you, and then have them find out that you’ve found out who’s dialed you– with alacrity. But none of us believe the utopian view of ubiquitous or pervasive technology. It makes some things easier, sure. But it complicates others.

Which types of knowledge should be included in the artefacts and which would lie in people’s minds?

Personally I’m dubious that ‘smart’ technologies will ever be able to fully understand people’s activities, and I’m sensitive to privacy concerns as well. I think there’s more potential for systems that don’t presume to know too much, but instead are a bit hesitant or ‘shy’. Like a polite acquaintance, they wouldn’t insist on intimate access, but instead would draw what inferences they could from unobtrusive sources, using incomplete evidence and leaving room for privacy and deniability. And they wouldn’t insist upon their interpretation, but gently suggest it, leaving room for you to correct them or find your own meaning in their misinterpretations. In a very real way, such systems might be smarter than the ones we usually hear about. They’d reflect the fact that knowledge emerges in the interplay between agents, rather than residing in a single know-it-all. This is the sort of system we’re hoping to develop in the project with Intel and Cornell.

In many texts, "inhabitant” is being replaced with “user”. Do you have any comments on this?

Since you ask, yes. It’s clearly indicative of the way that researchers can focus so much on the specific system they’re trying to promote that they lose sight of the wider context of people’s lives. Still, I use the term ‘user’ at times too. It’s a matter of focus and balance. Sometimes you want to focus on people as users of a specific system. But you can’t lose sight of the fact that people aren’t just users of a given system, and that their use is likely to be a minor part of their lives.

What do you see as the main achievement(s) in/of Equator? How would you characterize the shared focus of the projects in Equator?

Equator has achieved a huge amount in terms of individual prototypes, experiences, technologies and conceptual frameworks. I’d say the main achievement – and the shared focus – is to pursue research on cutting-edge ubiquitous technologies ‘in the wild’, with non-expert users in uncontrolled settings. The nature of research ‘in the wild’ is very different from research in the lab, and encourages different questions and conceptualizations. This has taught us a huge amount not only about the practical contingencies of such systems, but about the lived motivations and desires of people who might use these sorts of technologies.

The other achievement of Equator is to create a close-knit community from a wide range of researchers working in different fields and at different institutions. Any interdisciplinary project will do this to a degree, but the time we’ve had to work together, as well as the scale of funding we’ve had, has allowed us to understand and appreciate one another far beyond the usual collaborative project. We’ve been able to create systems and understandings that I simply don’t believe we could have created in any other context. It’s been an extraordinary experience.

What is your understanding of AmI?

I suppose it goes back to what I was saying about ‘smart’ artifacts. I don’t really believe in the vision of an ambient intelligence unless that incorporates all the uncertainty and potential for mistakes of our own. Rather than seeing ‘smart’ environments, systems, artifacts etc. as quietly competent servants working infallibly in the background for our convenience, it might be better to see them as new partners in a conversation about the state of the world, our lives, and the best ways forward. That is, instead of them being intelligent for us, they might help prompt us to use our own intelligence in new and unexpected ways.

Do you have any views/comments/advice on the future design of interactive applications and the directions Convivio could or should take?

The key fact about new interactive applications is that they will be used in our everyday lives, not just our workplaces. This means they must reflect the richness and complexity of everyday life, and serve values beyond efficiency and productivity. My fear is that as we in the research community start to address these new domains, we don’t take this seriously enough. It is as if we are designing for people from the movies – stereotyped, one-dimensional people that we don’t even embody ourselves. One of the most fundamental questions we need to start asking ourselves as researchers, I think, is whether we personally would like to live with the systems we are creating. All too often I think the answer is likely to be ‘no’.

William Gaver is Professor of Interaction Research at the Royal College of Art. He has pursued research on innovative technologies for over 15 years, working with and for companies such as Apple, Hewlett Packard, IBM and Xerox. He has gained an international reputation for a range of work that spans auditory interfaces, theories of perception and action, and interaction design. Currently he focuses on design-led methodologies and digital devices for everyday life, exploring subjective, playful approaches to creating novel technologies for domains ranging from the home to Antarctic lakes.