personal information ecologies erickson
DESCRIPTION
Once upon a time, Personal Information Management was, well, personal. The “Personal Information” was phonenumbers and to-dos and notes and emails and personal papers and files and folders. The “Management” was abouthow one organized what one had so that it could be re-found when it was needed to get our everyday work done.Things have changed. Personal Information is still personal, but there is so very much more of it. My bookmarks. Mysongs. My social network. And some of it is considerably more personal than it used to be. My locations as reportedby my smart phone. My weight as gathered by my wifi scale. My steps and heart rate sensed during my workouts.Furthermore, as personal as it is, we are choosing to share much of it, for reasons that go far beyond simply getting oureveryday work done. “Management” seems like an increasingly inadequate word for what we do with our personalinformation. In this talk I reflect on PIM, how it has changed over the two decades I’ve been studying it, and thechallenges I see ahead.TRANSCRIPT
Personal Information Ecologies: PIM in the Age of Sensors and Social Networks
Thomas Erickson Social Computing Group IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
CSCW 2012 Workshop on Personal Information Management Bellevue, Washington February 12, 2012
* Thanks to Jonathan Feinberg for his great service at http://wordle.net
Preface
is is a keynote for the CSCW 2012 Workshop on Personal Information Management (PIM). e tag cloud on the previous page shows the content of the submissions abstracts, with very common terms, like PIM, omitted.
I come at PIM from two directions. I have long made concerted (some would say obsessive) efforts to design ways of managing my own personal information. And I’ve also worked on PIM research and development projects, primarily in the late 80’s and early 90’s during my years at Apple – so I come to the topic with a bit of perspective – and the fabled 20-20 hindsight.
In this talk I reflect on my research, and the lessons that were learned (or that should have been learned). ese include the spatial nature of PIM, hunters and gatherers, guilt piles; and the Prime Dogma of PIM. I also discuss how things have changed since then, and offer two provocative examples of some of the new forms of PIM that are emerging as we see the rise of sensor-generated personal information, and the increasing use of PIM as a social currency.
© 2012 Thomas Erickson Social Computing Group, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center slide 2
The Talk
Looking Backward: A Walk Down Memory Lane • PIM in the Material World • Making PIM Digital
How Things have Changed!
Looking Forward: Two Provocative Examples • Social Meets Sensors • Death Don’t Have no Mercy
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PIM in the Material World
In the footsteps of Tom Malone How Do People Organize Their Desks? (1983)
Note that we were not the first to study PIM. We took inspiration from the work of Tom Malone, and others.
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Look, an adding machine, how cool is that?
PIM in the Material World
The Artifacts Study (circa 1989–90) How do you manage your personal information?
Show us the tools you use. Walk us through your day. Tell us about a failure of your system.
© 2012 Thomas Erickson Social Computing Group, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center slide 5
Yes, the picture in front is not circa 1990, but it’s apt. e one in back is of Apple in that era…
PIM in the Material World
The Artifacts Study: Items of interest Daytimer, notebook, post-its, tape recorder, voice
mail, files & folders (paper), stacks, &c PCs with their files & folders,
email, floppy disks, &c And of course the practices
in which these artifacts were embedded
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Notice all the artifacts, and how they’re distributed around the landscape of the office.
PIM in the Material World
The Artifacts Study: ‘Findings’ A spectrum of styles: Hunters and Gatherers
Hunters Hunters exert relatively little
energy organizing incoming information.
Like often ends up with like Effort is spent finding
information when it is needed But hunters usually know
where to search, because they they know the ‘habits’ of their information, and that it tends to be found in certain territories
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A Hunter’s Office
PIM in the Material World
The Artifacts Study: ‘Findings’ A spectrum of styles: Hunters and Gatherers
Gatherers Gatherers exert lots of
energy organizing incoming information.
Information is organized to support particular tasks using artifacts and personal ‘systems’ (e.g., notations)
A Gatherer, at least in theory, needs to exert little effort to find things. They are ‘at hand’
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A Hunter’s Office
A Gatherer’s Office
PIM in the Material World
The Artifacts Study: ‘Findings’ A spectrum of styles: Hunters and Gatherers
The Hunter-Gatherer Tradeoff Hunters’ systems are robust:
they are not very efficient, but they rarely fail badly
Gatherers’ systems are fragile: if a gatherer gets overloaded, and fails to invest the energy to keep the system working, catastrophic collapse can occur
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A Hunter’s Office
A Gatherer’s Office
PIM in the Material World
The Artifacts Study: ‘Findings’ A spectrum of styles: Hunters and Gatherers
Some Design Implications If Gatherers have to hunt,
they usually fare poorly because they’ve created an artificial terrain and can’t guess where the information will be
The unified in-box concept (one place for email, voice mail, faxes, etc.) • It’s not great for Hunters
because it mixes different stuff together in one place.
• And Gatherers don’t want them either – they want to get stuff out of the inbox
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A Hunter’s Office
A Gatherer’s Office
PIM in the Material World
The Artifacts Study: ‘Findings’
The “Guilt Pile” A document or piece of mail arrives You don’t have time to deal with it… …and so you put it on a pile on your desk
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A Guilt Pile
I particularly like how this pile is delicately balanced on desk’s edge
PIM in the Material World
The Artifacts Study: ‘Findings’
The “Guilt Pile” A document or piece of mail arrives You don’t have time to deal with it… …and so you put it on a pile on your desk
As time passes the pile grows larger You can see things embedded in it You begin to feel uncomfortable
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A Guilt Pile
PIM in the Material World
The Artifacts Study: ‘Findings’
The “Guilt Pile” A document or piece of mail arrives You don’t have time to deal with it… …and so you put it on a pile on your desk
As time passes the pile grows larger You can see things embedded in it You begin to feel uncomfortable
Finally, prompted by its growing mass Or a glimpse of something you have to deal with You sort through it
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A Guilt Pile
PIM in the Material World
The Artifacts Study: ‘Findings’
The “Guilt Pile” A document or piece of mail arrives You don’t have time to deal with it… …and so you put it on a pile on your desk
As time passes the pile grows larger You can see things embedded in it You begin to feel uncomfortable
Finally, prompted by its growing mass Or a glimpse of something you have to deal with You sort through it
You can discard quite a bit of no longer relevant stuff You pick out a couple of things to deal with You put the smaller, neater, more stable pile back And you feel good
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A Guilt Pile
PIM in the Material World
The Artifacts Study: ‘Findings’
“Guilt Pile” Design Implications An effective instance needs to be visible Ideally, it is composed of non-uniform materials
so that its content is legible And so that its state reflects the amount of
effort that has been put into it
And more generally Our ability to effectively do PIM
is bound up with our sense of self, our feelings of self-efficacy, and our public images
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A Guilt Pile
It is only with the advent of the iPhone® that artifacts for digital PIM have achieved the beauty and symbolic weight of the leather-clad Day Runner™, et al.
PIM in the Material World
The Artifacts Study: ‘Findings’
A side note on the “Guilt Pile” Others designed and implemented digital “piles” While the design had many nice features,
it was not true to the eco-systemic nature of piles: The system would automatically sub-divide and
straighten the piles, eliminating the guilt-driven sorting and winnowing of the pile…
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A Guilt Pile
Self-organizing and self-sorting digital piles were cool, but they lost the power of Guilt, a key ally in the battle against entropy
PIM in the Material World
The Accountants Study
A visit to KPMG Observations Interviews Presentation of a vision:
an online library of the company’s reports
Findings Accountants are largely Gatherers Interesting artifacts (clipping notebooks) and practices
(skimming, annotating, meta-auditing) And the enthusiastic but yet deflating response to
“Do you think you would use this?” Yes, but…
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But they weren’t actually very interested in the content of the reports. ey wanted to use the reports to find out who the authors were. en they’d call up the author to find out the politics, and the dirt, and useful trivial stuff like what kind of Scotch the CEO liked. … And of course after that, they owed the author a favor…
PIM in the Material World
The Points Much PIM is mediated by artifacts,
and involves sometimes elaborate practices PIM also takes place in space:
where the artifacts are matters… and it’s not arbitrary Some PIM is not mediated by artifacts:
it’s managed by keeping it in the head, and by oral transmission
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Making PIM Digital
Rosebud (1990–93) Designing a Desktop Information System:
Observation and Issues (CHI 1991)
Information access for ordinary users Focus on the “10,000 database” problem… …and user discomfort with query languages But also addressed the PIM-ish problems of
finding and re-finding
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ere is much about this paper that now seems quite quaint. …How on earth will users manage to use query languages? But at least we assumed they wouldn’t…
Making PIM Digital
Rosebud (circa 1990)
The User Interface Reporters searched databases and maintained columns in
a personal newspaper newspaper readers
could save articles of interest to a notebook
Reporters and newspapers were Hunter-oriented…
Notebooks were, of course, for Gatherers
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Making PIM Digital
Rosebud
The Notebook Temporal organization
(like a pile) Use of annotations
(as observed on paper) “Bird’s-eye-view” to
leverage annotations
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Quaint or not, I still want this!
Making PIM Digital
Rosebud
The Results Reporters and a Newspaper
implemented as a product called “Apple Search”, which failed…
Notebooks not implemented
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Making PIM Digital
Proteus (~1993-96)
A Personal Notebook Implemented in HyperCard Used for several years Various means use to track
and analyze use
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is paper remains among the most popular on my personal site – however, I have no idea where the hits are coming from.
Making PIM Digital
Proteus (~1993-96)
Structure ToC showing Sections … and subsections of
selected section With a set of navigation,
annotation, and searching controls along the bottom
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Making PIM Digital
Proteus (~1993-96)
Structure Sub-section ToC showing
first line of each page
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Making PIM Digital
Proteus (~1993-96)
Structure And a content page
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Making PIM Digital
Proteus (~1993-96)
Two comments A huge amount of
idiosyncratic complexity co-evolved over time • Header creation and
reuse in ToC • Separators • Ability to “post”
to-do’s I would not have wanted
any of this when I started using the notebook
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Making PIM Digital
Proteus (~1993-96)
Two comments A huge amount of
idiosyncratic complexity co-evolved over time
The unconsidered incorporation of an email button changed everything!
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Making PIM Digital
Proteus (~1993-96)
Synergy! Because I could easily
email notes, I took care to take better notes: more detail, context, etc
Because my notes were better, they were more useful to me later, and easier to search for
My ‘Prime Dogma of PIM’ The way in which one uses personal information,
shapes its creation, maintenance and management, which in turn shapes its use
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Making PIM Digital
The Points Throughout, there was a focus on creating
digital variants of PIM artifacts We were intent on cramming it all into the digital
box that (mostly) sat on the desk.
We didn’t (or couldn’t) follow up on • Spatial/ecological aspects
(Hunters and Gatherer’s use of space) • Social aspects
(Some types of personal information stay ‘in the head’ and are shared orally and person to person)
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Making PIM Digital
The Points
The Prime Dogma is still true Use PI Use’ PI’…
For instance, “AudioNote” on the iPad is changing my note-taking now
As is Siri on the iPhone
The Moral If the use of personal information is so important to how we do PIM,
then we may wish to pay close attention to how those uses are shifting…
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We underestimate how big a difference making things radically easy makes. Siri now knows who my Mom is, and where I live.
How Things Have Changed!
1995 - 2005
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How Things Have Changed!
Personal Info in the Public Sphere
The one thing I was right about • “A personal page is a carefully constructed
portrayal of a person.”
• “For the first time, individuals can project huge amounts of detailed information about themselves to a mass audience”
• “On the positive side, it enables new search strategies based on our social knowledge, it lowers the social cost of accessing and sharing information, and it makes the Web a more interesting and engaging place.”
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is section is a list of things I failed to anticipate… but at least I got this right!
How Things Have Changed!
The Rise of (Private) Social Networks, Sharing and Broadcasting Friendster (2002), Orkut (2004), Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006), Linked In (2002)…
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One reason that such private social networks proved viable was…
How Things Have Changed!
The Success of Online Advertising Once upon a time it wasn’t clear how to make money by advertising on the web (hard to believe, but true!) But once it is true, personal information becomes quite valuable, and of interest to Others…
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And once online advertising becomes viable, personal information becomes valuable!
How Things Have Changed!
The Rise of PIM Intermediaries All I wanted was to download a paper All Docstoc.com wanted was
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Ghostery: tracking trackers
Lots of entities are interested in where I go on the web!
How Things Have Changed!
Self-Tracking Although it goes back quite a ways,
Manual and automatic self-tracking has become quite a phenomena
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Mycrocosm: Visual Microblogging, Assogba and Donath
And the owners of personal information are developing new interests in using it as well
How Things Have Changed!
Cheap Popular Sensors Digital pedometers Heart rate monitors miCoach – real time coaching are making it increasingly easy to generate lots of very personal data
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is had started by ‘05, but it is really coming on now!
How Things Have Changed!
The Points People are projecting their personal information into the public sphere They are also amassing more and more personal information in digital form And there are an increasing range of venues in which it may be used
And so if you believe in the Prime Dogma of PIM, these are very interesting times!
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Two Thought-Provoking Examples
Lose-It • Social Meets Sensors
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Two Thought-Provoking Examples
Lose-It • Set your goal • Track your weight
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Two Thought-Provoking Examples
Lose-It • Buy a wifi scale • Use an iPhone app • Or a Fitbit®, or…
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Two Thought-Provoking Examples
Lose-It • Share it with friends • and talk about it
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Personal information provides grist for conversation
Two Thought-Provoking Examples
Lose-It • Join a team
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Two Thought-Provoking Examples
Lose-It • Share you successes and failures with the team • and everyone else on Lose-It
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And can serve as a sort of social currency in the community
Two Thought-Provoking Examples
Lose-It • and do the weekly weigh-in by entering your weight in a Google Doc
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If you miss your weekly weigh-in, you get “benched”
Lots of weights reported to the tenth of a pound – digital scales in action?
Two Thought-Provoking Examples
Lose-It • Not public enough for you? – configure Twitter and Facebook to publish your updates
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Two Thought-Provoking Examples
And there’s more Lose-it is just one example…
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Two Thought-Provoking Examples
Death Don’t Have No Mercy Yesterday Samuel Pepys tweeted several times …even though he’s been dead for over 300 years
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Two Thought-Provoking Examples
Who is this fellow? Samuel Pepys (“peeps”) London, 17th Century Rose from humble beginnings to
become Secretary of the Navy Kept a diary from about 1660 to 1670 These were interesting times
• English Civil War • Restoration of Charles II • Great Fire of London • The Plague • And a number of more personal
events of interest only to the salacious Diary was for Pepys’ eyes only
– entries often telegraphic and cryptic
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Two Thought-Provoking Examples
Phil Gyford and PepysDiary.com Pepys diary republished as a blog Each day’s entry posted at 11pm London
time (lagged by 344 years) Every day people arrive and ‘unpack’ each
day’s entry in the comments
PepysDiary.com has been successful • Now in its 9th year • Steady stream of visitors • Core of consistent commentators • Very interesting conversations
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Two Thought-Provoking Examples
Why It’s Interesting Collaborative unpacking of entries People contribute in a variety of ways
• Defining archaic word uses • Providing historical other context • Asking questions • Creating cross references • Providing niche expertise on topics:
e.g., kidney stones, fishing, cannon • Reprimanding ‘Sam’ for his many
personal failings
Participants clearly find this fun and engaging, and many return regularly
It provides a very interesting window into understanding a particular place and a time
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A lovely example of the use of personal information – this time not your own! – as a social currency
Two Thought-Provoking Examples
The Point is simply that new uses of personal information are constantly emerging and if we believe “Use PI Use’ PI’…”, we need to study them!
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Wrap Up
Once Upon a Time Much PIM was done via material artifacts Distributed through a local landscape According to Hunter and Gatherer logics
Some PIM was oral and socially mediated
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Wrap Up
Then PIM became digital It got crammed into the box on the desk And we mostly lost sight of its spatial
and social aspects
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Wrap Up
But things have changed, and are changing…
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Wrap Up
What should this look like next year?
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I’m happy to chat, if you don’t mind occasional lags in the rhythm of email
–Tom [email protected]