Made out of people

More signs

Last week, I gave you a collection of unusual, incomprehensible, and just interesting signs from Vienna. This week, some more, starting with the fabulous Ashtray Pig of Westbanhopf. Smokers stub out their last cigarette here before descending into the train station, the only smokeless place I found in the city.

Update: Nikita points to those wonderful rendundant clocks on the building-side. So I decided I'd show just how redundant they are. No, I don't know why this (Hungarian) building has four similar-not-identical clocks showing almost-the-same time. Or why these are on the bottom of one larger, also nearly identical clock.

Warning! Well-muscled Socialist realist men at work!

All sorts of people may cross--men with hats, men with bags.

Even little grey aliens.

Some places, men with children may go, others they may not.

Some places, children may play, others they may not.

Exercise: Putting together what you have learned from previous images, what does this one mean? Does the red X at the bottom negate the rest?

Exercise 2: What about this one? (I think it is "Caution! Gas may be found 50 meters to your right, day and night, although you may not park.")

Is this a warchalker sign? Are Hungarian hoboes this formal in their work? What does this mean?

Budapest on the 1st of May

Travelogue, again:

Thursday, the night after the conference, was busy. I made it to the opera¹, talked with my advisor and a future student about fornicating baboons², and then stayed up late talking job search and school gossip and possible collaborations and all sorts of happy life events. We found a bar called Yellow³, and talked late into the night.

And Friday was a mellow morning. After so tiring a conference, the day of outgoing flights is a quiet one. A cup of coffee, some orange juice to nurse a headache, a little talking while the Vienna streetside goes by. Then I met a friend of the family, Veronika, who drove me down to Budapest for the weekend.

Veronika lives in Krems, Austria, but visits her family most weekends. Which, in turn, means she passes through passport control on the Austrian-Hungarian border each week. On Friday, she passed that checkpoint for the last time. (I will have to admit that the border guards did not, perhaps, put much care into the task.) On Saturday, May 1st, Hungary joined the European Union; the checkpoints and border crossings were reduced and taken down.

Updated 5/10 with pictures

This once-Communist country, scarcely a decade old, is joining with France and Spain and Germany to form a part of the growing union. The feelings thoroughout the country are fascinatingly mixed. Rumors fly about what life will be like within the EU. We will be unable to eat poppyseed cake! fear some of the older generations: the EU's stricter drug controls may limit poppy imports; the popular home poppy gardens might be seen with disapproval; and the traditional, mildly narcotic bread, made densely out of pounds of the seeds, might be controlled⁴. But overall there is a great deal of excitement: that fifteen years ago they needed to wait for years to visit the West, and now they are part of it!

I spent the weekend with Veronika, with her mother (a woman old enough to remember the rise of Communism as well as its fall, who has lived at various times in California, Italy, and both sides of Germany), and with her nephew (raised under a Communist government, but lived for 13 years in Florida). They were happy to share their thoughts about this momentous occasion.

The younger generations are angry at the leadership. Yes, joining the EU is probably the right long-term move, they agree. But in exchange for providing a hungry consumer market to the Union with greatly reduced taxes, they want something back. Poland apparently negotiated for a fairly substantial subsidy, and kept the negotiations active until the very last moment.

The Hungarian government--some say with a bit of a sneer--capitulated. It's the same scoundrels as during communism, but now they act capitalist. They point out that the prime minister was recently revealed as a former secret police officer; that the local Museum of Terror (looking at both the German and Soviet periods) has pictures of many cabinet members from the old files, and so is periodically threatened by the government. And why not? They spent the years before obeying Moscow; now Paris and Berlin speak, and again they say "yes sir."

And how does that make them different from the rest of the Iron Curtain? Their stunning lack of military success⁵. Since the 15th Century, I was told, Hungary has not won a war. It has temporarily taken Vienna; it was then conquored by the Habsburgs for the Austro-Hungarian Empire... and the Austrians, my friends said, definitely wore the pants. It was the Austrians who led the empire into yet another losing war in 1914. Austria survived that largely intact; Hungary was humiliatringly It joined with Germany in World War II--and was occupied twice in a row, once the Germans to keep them from running; then liberated and occupied by the Soviets.

Now, perhaps, they have hitched their fortunes to a more winning horse. Or so they hope. Perhaps this will be one with fewer wars, and more success stories.

There will be a few years of hardship--the farmers are scared of competing against French subsidies; the economists want to control climbing interest rates and inflation; the government will lose tarrifs--but everyone thinks that things might someday look better. Immigrants will come looking for jobs; the educated might be more able to leave and send money home. How, and when, all those changes will happen still seems a little mysterious. My guide, who works for a large multinational, is worried that local businesses still aren't used to the new capitalist system and will get crushed by the newly-incoming hordes. The corporate email about unification came out on Wednesday. We were called in on Friday, at 2 in the afternoon to try to turn over all the systems. And when I asked what happens to our supply trucks in transit--who are suddenly experiencing a change in regulations--my supervisor shrugged. "They'll figure it out," he said.

---

The celebration, then, is something to note. The entire city--indeeed, much of the nation--comes out for the parties on the 30th, as a big sand-timer counts down the hours until unification. The 1st of May is International Worker's Day; like everything else associated with Socialism in the US, it is viewed with a little bit of distrust. In Europe, it is celebrated with picnics and parties. And now that day has another layer of meaning; it is unification day. The city had taken its various famous bridges and modified them for the occasion: the Chain Bridge is a pedestrian pathway; a second has been layered with sod and planted with trees; the last has fountains pouring off either side, and huge silk-screens of a water-polo scene. The Danube-side on both edges is packed with people wandering through booths representing the various nations (Greek Gyros; Italian tourism; Dutch beer; British fish & chips; Swedish fighter jets). Concert stages at Heros' Square feature a wide variety of international bands; the city park is a fair-grounds, turned over to beer-halls. The glossy papers declare "EUphoria," while a museum runs a racy exhibit, "EUrotika".

Planes fly over a bit later: helicopters, classics (both Soviet and American); passenger. The new Swedish fighters--subjects of tremendous controversky--do not show, however. Last a stunt plane zips under the chain bridge and then climbs, spiralling and tumbling over the Danube river. At sunset, fireworks lit the sky. This city, which ordinarily matches its postcards in calm beauty, is thronging with celebrating crowds, shouting at each other in Hungarian.

---

Walking again through the city that night, it looks a little different. The parties are settling down and the bars are closing, but for the drunkest few singing to old songs on the radio. The ground is covered with a layer of trash--empty cups of Coke and beer; chicken wrappers; glossy programs detailing the celebration to join the EU. May 2nd celebrates mother's day in Hungary, and you have to look good enough to bring her flowers and introduce her to your date.

Just how bad will the mess and the hangover be?

---

¹ There is something very pure about going to an opera like the one I saw in Vienna at the Volksopera. It was "La Traviata," in Italian with German subtitles. I didn't understand a word, and the sets were highly modern, gray highlights over dancing clowns, trying to suggest that the whole play might largely be the fever-dream of a sick young woman. And so I felt obligated to neither the words nor the plot, the sets nor the actors, and laid back and let Verdi wash over me for two hours. It was perfect.

² About which I need not repeat if you know; if you do not know, you ought to hear it from him rather than me.

³ One of our party taught the bartender how to make dirty martinis. This seems to be an obscure drink out here. "Wait--you want me to put olive brine into a vodka martini. Are you sure?"

⁴ My host thought that American poppyseed use--sprinkled lightly for texture and decoration--is largely funny.

⁵ Remember that web search for "French Military Victories"? Hungarians will tell you that France has done far, far better than they have.

Vienna signage

My time in vienna has not been entirely made up out of important talks and meaningful workshops. (Indeed, one might suggest that the reverse is sometimes true.)

But I have had a chance to take lots and lots of pictures. Our feature for the moment is signage. While signs may make a lot of sense to people who grow up with them, I'd suggest they are ... a little unusual ... to outsiders.

We had a number of guesses for this pair, for example. We'd seen the left one first: None shall pass! Not made out of people! Women's faces are Right Out! Holding hands is not desired! Streetwalking is forbidden! Not quite--actually turns out to be End of pedestrian road, traffic resumes. (The other side of the same sign is the right side "pedestiran area.")

There are more...

Men with hats might walk to the left or the right? Not quite. More, "pedestrians may pass on either side of gate."

Rules for the escalator ("Carry your dog! Don't drag your feet!")

Seating reserved for pregnant and reproductive blondes, undercover CIA guys, and evil guys from Hana-Barbara Cartoons.

Keep Off the Grass, and Away from the Naked People Fountain! (Ok, this one wasn't ambiguous. Just ubiquitous.)

And, last but not least, my phone left me this odd little message, leaving me wondering, "When will it be sent?"

Three Dimensions of Temporal Software

My workshop has been struggling with "temporality" for a while. We seem to have converged on a conversation about the notion of what temporality is about, and--as far as the conversation has gone--we want to talk about activity¹. Activity is a little tough to design, but it has something to do with the cluster of documents and ideas that are going on "right now." Some of the members are rather frustrated that when you ask a user "what they are doing", they get the answer "doing email."²

(Conversely, a few workshop think of temporailty as visualizations that show how soon two airplanes will crash if the user doesn't redirect them. Air traffic control seems to be our temporary example of True Temporal Research.)

Anyway. Once we get to activity, we were a little stuck. How big is a task? ("Getting a PhD" is a task; so is "answering the phone." They are not really the same sort of thing.)

Tom Moran points out Tom Malone's work on "Process Handbooks". We set up three axes, all of which get summarized as "top" to "bottom":

• From_Abstract_ ("Move the object") to concrete ("pick up the pen.")
• From Big ("clean desk") to little ("move the pen")
• From Tools and user interface to infrastructure.

This last describes the idea that we are sometimes at odds in deciding whether we're interested in user-interface components for the way that "activity looks", or thinking about underlying infrastructure. To me, the infrastructure is more interesting: once you know something about what it means (to the system, not the user) what a task looks like, a user interface for supporting that should be straighforward.

Conversely, the work that I saw demonstrated (Mary Czerwinski's work at Microsoft, for example) was shown as a series of snapshots of your desktop, or a way of storing a cumulative state of what applications and documents are open. While that is valuable information, it doesn't quite map (in my mind) to a task. For one thing, many of my documents are associated with multiple tasks, and vice versa. I'll need to straighten out quite what the taxonomy is.

For another, "doing email" (for example) is--in some sense--of my only two tasks. It's hierarchial, and it triggers lots of other tasks that need to be addressed ("write this document! find this reference!") which in turn trigger the uses of resources and data.

I'll need to give some thought to how these levels stack together.

[Updated 6/9/04 to correct typo in Mary's name]

¹ I admit I don't completely believe them: I think it loses out on collaboration, on counter-scheduling with others. But this is human-computer interaction, and I am a CSCW person. Collective people aren't quite as visible to this crowd---in these talks, we seem to model others more as "(potential) interruptions" than as users or collaborators or even sources and sinks of data.

² Theirs is much like the frustration of a parent whose kid has been talking on the phone for two hours. "What did you talk about?" "Nothing."

The rush after a talk

I am at a workshop at CHI 2004 on the "Temporal Aspects of Work." We're discussing our notions of time: "social time" vs "calendar time"¹, "monochronic" vs "polychronic" time², and how tasks and work are structured. Some of the talks have been brilliant and thoughtful; others have been more than a little bit dull. I, personally, am not much of a theorist at heart; I find too much discussion of the concepts without a couple of good experiments and observation to be more than a little dull. I felt like a fish out of water: no one in this group could possibly be interested in my work!

Then again, everyone else was also seeming a little droopy. It was time to give a talk that would build some excitmenet.

I changed my presentation on the fly. I threw away almost all of my theory slides, and discarded all the social network diagrams. And I scrabbled around my hard drive, finding my archive of pictures. If my theory wasn't going to be up to the theory they wanted.

And then I told stories. Stories of collaborations on projects, and of travel. Stories of relationships changing, and of social groups shifting.

It went well. I got arguments, I got thoughtful questions, I got people who thought I was wrong. And, better yet, I got people who thought that the people who thought I was wrong, were wrong. Which led to a fight. Fights are important. This blew over fast, but kept spurring discussion. It worked very nicely, and I was suddenly a part of the workshop.

And now I'm sitting here bopping along post-talk. Yay!

¹ The distinction between "12:00" and "lunchtime", or between "Dec 7" and "Pearl Harbor Day." One is a calendar description, one is a social description. The workplace is an interesting overlap, where

fn 2. The difference between the concept of "writing from 1-3" and "someone dropping by at 1:30, a phone call from 2-2:15, and email at 2:12"

Flying to Vienna

The CHI 2004 conference is in Vienna. I'm joining a workshop, then giving a talk. I'll write more about various news as they strike my fancy. For the moment, though, travelogue.

Sitting in the coach in the eleven-hour flight to London, looking out over endless oceans (if I was on the left side of the plane, I mightbe able to look out and see Rejkyavik, according to the little monitors on the backs of the seats), on a seat where the integrated, all-in-one controller has, finally and entirely, died. While this might not be a great loss were it just one or two of the functions, this small broken miracle of technology (a game pad, telephone, and channel remote control all in one) means that I have been without stewardess, and with overhead light, all night.

Those who read further than this will find that this narrative rapidly diverges from the topic of the user-interface of a broken hand-held controller, and will instead begin to discuss unsubstantiated gossip and stream-of-consciousness notes on the my seatmates. You have been warned.

I was able to coax enough life out of it to watch the final Matrix movie, whose (scant) merits need not be retold in this forum; I was unable to keep it alive afterward, and thus was saved the choice between old CSI episodes and Big Fish.

The woman next to me watched Kill Bill, twice, before she fell asleep. (The second time, to her credit, she spent chatting with her friends in the next seat over). She is one of a group that is startlingly well-dressed and styling next to me, and while they might just all be a little more LA than I am, I am enjoying the idea that I may be seated next to a line of b-list celebrities.

(I suppose I could talk to them. But that might break the illusion.)

The one who looks like Vanilla Ice--albeit with a mohawk, and an ipod--is stretched out across three seats in the cavernous center section of the plane.While that's fine for the empty center seat, and his own second-from-end seat, his feet are proppsed on the tray table of the woman next to him, an Asian girl in a red sweater. The girl next to me is a lovely chocolate-cream color, and had a model's poise when she was awake.

When she's asleep, I'm glad to say, she flops, just like everyone else.

She and the girl past her (the one with Vanilla Ice's feet and tatoo'd ankle on her tray table) spent the first bit of the flight, the take off portion, reading a variety of magazines that semed to have in common mostly the fact that they feature attractive women being photographed.

One was a fashion magazine. There was both FHM's "100 Top" list, and Maxim's latest issue. And there was a juvenile "Seventeen"-genre magazine. My seatmate examined each of them thoughtfully, gravely. Where my eyes might skim over a page of revealing figures, she studied the arched back, the curved leg, the artful airbrush. In the teen magazine, she seems to linger over the Britney pictures (and there are lots of Britney pictures). And she would be hard-pressed to claim she reads for the articles. I somehow like to think that the interest is professional.

A few rows forward and to the left are a couple of guys who look like motorcyclists. They each carry a wide assortment of scars and bruises on their faces, and talk with noisy northern-British accents. My first impression--and I just can't get it out of my head--is that a bunch of the British equivalent of Hells Angels have just come back from a trip to Bakersfield to hang out with their Yankee cousins.

I have, of course, no idea what time it is, but I'm trying to soak my head in the sunglight outside, and see if I can convince myself that it's more like the cloudy noon over Ireland that the sun claims, and less like the 3:26 am that my computer foolishly continues to think.

Update, spirallin toward Heathrow I am largely unable to talk to people on planes until we are about to land--it feels safer, like we've survived something together. Exhaustd, everyone looks like an axe murderer; there are no secrets between strangers who have slept in uncomfortable seats.¹ Turns out she and her friends are dancers with Britney Spears. They're doing two days in London, then on to Italy, and Germany, and a bunch of small towns. It's a monthlong European tour.

fn 1. There's an interesting song--can't find the reference offhand--off of the Sounds Ecelectic Too CD that gets stuck in my head whenever I'm on one of these long trips. Called "Jesus on the Grayhound." When I have an internet connection, I'll provide the right links.