The Hand that Rocks the Cradle

In a field with more than its quota of seers, salesmen and motormouthed gurus. there is something reassuringly levelheaded about
Gillian Crampton Smith's approach to interaction design. As professor
of Computer Related Design (CRD) at the Royal College of Art in
London, Crampton Smith directs one of the most progressive new technology master's-degree programs in the world. Her students and graduates are snapped up for placements and positions at Apple, Microsoft,
Philips, Taligent, Voyager and IDEO. Back in the early '8os, Crampton
Smith was one of the first British graphic designers to see the computer's potential and s!J.e expected things to move faster than they did.
Hence, perhaps, her caution today, the careful deliberation before she
will make a prediction or venture a claim.
Things are certainly moving now. Since early 1994, Interval, the Palo
Alto-based research corporation, has funded the Computer Related
Design department to the tune of £2.5 million ($3-75 million), payable
over five years. (Interval has similar relationships with Stanford
University and the MIT Media lab.) The week before my visit, CEO
David Liddle and 30 Interval personnel were over to present work on
musical interfaces, culminating in a "Soundscapes" performance by
musician-boffins Thomas Dolby and Michael Brook, for an audience that
included the likes of Peter Gabriel.
The Royal College of Art's strength, and its appeal for Interval, lies in
the way that the CRD department has grown from a genuinely multidisciplinary base. (By contrast, Stanford and MIT's research is strongly
rooted in technology, Carnegie Mellon's in graphic design and New York
University's in media and television.) "The college is a special place, in
that it brings together so many designers of talent from such a range of
disciplines," says Crampton Smith. "In some ways this makes it easier
for us." David Liddle concurs: "In the first five minutes with a piece of
technology, artists push it :o the edge. That is how you find out what is
possible. You need unreasonable p eople doing things for reasons they
can't verbalize." For Interval, collaborating with "not so obvious" institu-
6o
I.D . MAY JuN E 1995
People have Instinctive knowledge about
the way the physical world works: which way
is up, how objects fall and so on. Durrell
Bishop's Phone Answering Machine explores
the ways in which computing can be t1ken
off the desk and lntegreted Into everyday
objects. Durrell represents Incoming phone
messages with n:arbles: drop one into an
indentation in the machine and the m1!Ssage
plays; drop It Into the telephone and it dials
up your caller; if It's not for you, put lt in a
saucer to await your rcommate's retu:n.
tions outside America, such as the RCA, helps to keep the "gene pool"
open and ideas fresh.
Five years after CRD was founded, enough preparatory work has been
done to chart the way ahead. "We do research through projects," explains
Crampton Smith, sitting in her office on the third floor of the college's
main block, overlooking the greenery of Hyde Park. "The projects are in
a way experiments. Through designing we try to draw out what the
issues are so that when people come to design real things they can perhaps draw from some of our experience. We're trying to make things
that are generalizable, rather than taking particular problems and
finding a solution that is not then generalizable."
Three essential considerations will inform all future research. First,
that information technology is driven by people, not by the technology
itself. Artist/designers must make things, in other words, that ~both
work for people and are enjoyable." Second, information technology must
have a social and ethical dimension. And third, that the information
environment has an aesthetic dimension that is fundamental and not
merely an add-on. The task of designers and artists is therefore to G.raw
on the existing languages of painting, music, film and the other arts to
forge a new art of interaction design that is aesthetically complex and
rich in meaning- a fusion of the practical and the poetic.
To achieve this synthesis, Crampton Smith takes on 10 to 12 master's
students a year from architecture, industrial design, graphic design, furniture design, fashion, software engineering, psychology and other disciplines. So far CRD has had slightly less success attracting people with
audiovisual and video experience, the third cornerstone (along with
graphics and industrial design) of design for electronic media. Interval
funds 10 staff at the RCA in all, including researchers, research assistants and technicians; an Interval software engineer and mechanical
engineer are currently working in the department for two months.
"Interval hasn't paid for the results," says Crampton Smith. "It's paid
for the people and they get first option on any results. But generally
I.D.
M4Y jUNE
1995
we're reckoning to do things that are pretty open here, not to do secret
work." Roughly one idea a year is patented by the department. One,
jointly patented with the London-based Multimedia Corporation, is a
radio that can be programmed to record automatically if it detects material of interest to the listener- for instance, any piece of music by
Mozart- digitally signposted at the top of the broadcast signal.
Another, devised by Interval researcher Durrell Bishop, is a proposal for
"electronic paper" that would allow additional information to be encoded
within the paper itselffor access through an electronic tablet.
CRD sets out to address any device or process that responds to the
user- from "multimedia to microwave ovens." There are four main
areas of research: computer software and hardware; electronic products;
interactive infot mation and entertainment; and intelligent environments. So fo.r the emphasis has fallen on the design of tools, such as software or hand-held computers, rather than the design of what Crampton
Smith describes, with some reluctance, as "content." Partly, she says,
this is due to an "historical accident" that has left the RCA with a separate Interactive Multimedia course housed within the School of
Communication Design, while CRD is in the School of Design for
Industry. The division implies the existence of precisely those "!>oundaries that Crampton Smith seeks to erase. ''I'm interested in developing
different ways ofthinking about the content and the form as one, rather
than content that is poured into form," she says.
Some of the research within CRD attempts to rethink software tools
we already take for granted. Pinboard, a "non-hierarchical interface"
designed by Martin Locker, Nick Durrant and Julie Knaggs, questions
the established model of the Macintosh/Windows desktop by offering a
wide pictorial dataspace that allows the user to organize and archive files
according to the informal groupings and personal priorities that one
might bring to a notice board or an entire room.
Durrell Bishop. on the other hand, is investigating the divisions
between the elements of a process that unfold on screen and those that
The desktop metaphor Is !Ike lhe ard Index
in a library: the information is there but
hidden. If you know what you are looldng
for you c~~n find it, but the cards alllo:~k the
same and don't glve you much feel for the
books they represent. The Pinboarl!, an ongo·
lng project by Nick Durrant, Julie Knaggs and
Martin Locker, was conceived as a replace·
ment for the desktop, or an application that
sits on top of lt. a allows users to interact
directly with their material, rather than
with abstract icons that stand In place of It,
and allows them to leverage tYIO important
ways we use memory: through spatial and
temporal mapping.
As Interactive technology becomes increas-
ingly smaller ar.d no longer needs to be
tethered to the desktop, one question arises:
How do you carry these things? Can they
become fashion ltl'mS rather than afflce
equipment? Lorn Ross's Phone Glove Is
dri'len by ideas of exploring new kinds of
social protocols that might arise from these
new technologies. Everyone has probably
had the intrusive experience of soml!one
loudly mobile-phoning their friends In a
restaurant; Ross's project explores more
dellcate and reticent ways of having a private
call In a public place. The Phone Glove allows
you to speak into your hand - an act that Is
reminiscent of t8th-century ladles whispering
behind their fans .
happen in the physical world. In his telephone answering machine,
incoming messages are represented as marbles that accumulate in an
external groove, giving software processes a three-dimensional expression that the eye quickly grasps. It is the larger issue here, rather than
the specifics of the design, that counts for Crampton Smith. "That's not
a proposal for an answering machine," she says, "that's a proposal for an
approach. In the past, the urge has been to put everything on screen
because it's so easy and simple and clean and neat. But Durrell feels, and
I think his approach has very much rubbed off on us all. that there are
natural things that you just know how to do."
This degree of "naturalness" and transparency is precisely what is
missing, even now, from so many computer products. A couple of days
after we meet, Crampton Smith and three Interval researchers give a
presentation to RCA students. Colin Burns talks about the technique of
"informance" -using performance and storytelling as design aids and psychologist William Gaver describes an experimer.t in which variations in sound are used to monitor a bottling plant. Afterwards, one
skeptical student brings the discussion down to earth w~th the abruptness of a system crash by describing the all-too-familiar problems she
has experienced helping a neighbor print out a letter with a word-pro·
cessing program. "Clearly there is a long way to go," agrees Crampton
Smith diplomatically. "A lot of people in the department are quite skeptical about the benefits of technology. We are not gung ho."
Crampton Smith's own conversion came in 1981, while reading a
magazine article about the computer's uses in graphic design. She
bought an Apple II, taught herself Basic (later adding Forth and Pascal to
her repertoire} and began work on a program that would allow her to do
page layouts on screen. It took her two years. "I just felt that ordinary
designerly commonsense really hadn't been applied to those kinds of
problems." In 1984, convinced that other graphic designers would be
similarly interested in the computer's potential, she set up a computer
studio and started a postgraduate course at St. Martin's School of Art.
I.D . MAY
)UNl
1995
She moved to the RCA in 1989, becoming a professor in 1992.
For someone in the vanguard of interaction design research,
Crampton Smith is refreshingly frank about her allegiance to the book.
She studied philosophy and art history at Cambridge- "a traditional
academic education"- before turning to typography and working as a
designer on the Sunday Times and the Times Literary Supplement. Her
conversation runs from the decline of poetry to Rudolph Arnheim's clas·
sic treatise on film aesthetics, Film as Art. She travels with a PowerBook
and uses e-mail, but wastes no time surfing the Net. "My sense is that it
takes too much time to get the nuggets. I would rather have a book that
an editor has gone through, and that somebody has suggested might
interest me."
Crampton Smith's sympathy with the established media that new
forms a{ interactive information delivery will have to equal and surpass
makes her a particularly demanding critic. "Reading is very effective and
people who are at home with words can process at a fantastic rate," she
says. "With a book, you know whether you want to read it and you can
find the bits you want to read pretty quickly. You can fillet it. Those skills
are very difficult to use with current technology." In the same way, she
points out, it is impossible to scan and evaluate the relative importance
ofincoming e-r.1ail in the way you can a pile ofletters. The department
plans to investigate an expanded form of e-mail- "a digital no~ice­
board"- that would allow the sending of audio, video and pictures, and
find ways of using graphic and information design techniques to manage "information overload."
"We understand very little yet about what makes a pleasurable interaction," says Crampton Smith. But such knowledge will be essential to
the design of everyday products that people of all kinds can slip into
using ..vithout conscious effort. By demonstrating the essential place of
designers and artists in this process, her department is helping to bring
about an information environment in which the tools will fit the way we
feel and think. ....
Top to bottom: Thinking of an ATM as just a
terminal to a remote database, Dennis Poon's
Personal Financial Adviser explores ways In
which this tech11ology could interact remotely
with a stockbroiter - either on screen or In vir·
tual reality; Durrant, Knaggs and Locker's
desktop-defying Pin board project; A sampling
of Martin Loclter's term-end digital portfolio Is
navigated via an alphabet situated on the lefthand side of the interface; the letter In focus
indicates a project to be perused, a summary
appears and the demo can be played.