“With a musical instrument, it’s awkward at first. All thumbs. Uncomfortable. Noise. With practice, instrument and musician become as one. Co-creating music. So it will be with personal technology. Now, a prosthetic of mind, it will become a prosthetic of being. A violinist with a violin. Us with our gadgets, embodied, attending as we choose.”

For context, Linda also pointed me toward another of her posts, A new era of post-productivity computing? where she closes with the question

“How do we usher in an era of Conscious Computing? What tools, technologies, and techniques will it take for personal technologies to become prosthetics of our full human potential?”

I’ve wrestled with similar questions in the past:

“In the arts, we speak of a talented and communicative practitioner as a virtuoso. The virtuous performer combines technical mastery of her medium with a great depth of human expressiveness, communicating with her audience at symbolic, intuitive and emotional levels. Can we imagine a similar kind of virtuosity of communication, applied to domains that are not traditionally considered art? Can we further make this possibility accessible to more people, allowing a richer level of discourse in the walks of everyday life?

“When groups of musicians play together, they establish communication channels among themselves through the give and take of listening and leading. Great ensemble players know how to establish a state of flow, a groove, where the music takes on a vitality and life of its own, greater than the sum of the individual rhythms, pitches and timbres. What are the conditions that make such a group ‘chemistry’ possible? Could we capture that essence and apply it to the work of organizations, the building of communities, the life of families?

“As information technologies increasingly become integral to our activities, the information we use, even to our ways of thinking and perceiving, we must confront some difficult, elusive notions about the relationships between people and their tools. For instance, in what sense can the technology enhance creative, playful thinking — are we having fun? What about beauty, inspiration, spirituality, mystery? These are qualities for which humans have striven over our entire history; shall we subjugate them in the name of efficiency, convenience and immediacy? Do the artifacts we make allow people space for reflection and insight, or merely add to the numbing cacophony of digital voices demanding our attention? Is it strange to ask such questions? Not at all. The economics of information technologies seem to dictate a future where more and more of our lives will be mediated by networks and interfaces and assorted other paraphernalia of progress. We must recognize the importance of such uniquely human concerns and integrate them into our vision, or risk further dehumanization in our already fractured society.”

Okay, that was from 1994, so where are we on this? I have to say, it seems like mainstream computing has advanced very little in these areas. Apple has good intentions, and the iPad actually does a nice job of getting out of the way, letting you interact directly and physically with individually embodied apps. It’s the best of the bunch, but the iPad is no violin, no instrument of human expression. Certainly the current crop of PCs, netbooks and phones are no better.

There are a few non-mainstream computing paradigms that give me hope for a conscious computing experience. The Nike+ running system, my favorite example of embodied ubi-media, creates an inherently physical experience augmented with media and social play. Nike+ doesn’t have a broadly expressive vocabulary, but it does bring your whole body into the equation and closes the feedback loop with contextually suitable music and audio prompts.

At its best, Twitter starts to feel like a global jam session between connected minds. The rapid fire exchange of ideas, the riffing off others’ posts, the flow of a well-curated stream can sometimes feel uniquely expressive. Yes, it is primarily a mental activity and mostly disembodied, but the occasional flashes of genuine group chemistry are wonderfully suggestive of the potential for an interconnected humanity.

For me, the most interesting possibilities arise from games. There are the obvious examples of physical interaction and expression that the Wii and Kinect deliver primarily for action games now, but with time a broader range of immersive and reflective experiences (is Wii Yoga any good?). I’m also thinking of the emerging genre of out-in-the-world games like SF0, SCVNGR and Top Secret Dance Off that send you on creative, social missions involving physicality, play, performance and discovery. Finally there is the next generation of “gameful” games, as proposed by Jane McGonigal:

What is Gameful?

We invented the word gameful! It means to have the spirit, or mindset, of a gamer: someone who is optimistic, curious, motivated, and always up for a tough challenge. It’s like the word “playful” — but gamier! Gameful games are games that have a positive impact on our real lives, or on the real world. They’re games that make us:

• happier
• smarter
• stronger
• healthier
• more collaborative
• more creative
• better connected to our friends and family
• more resilient
• better problem-solvers
• and better at WHATEVER we love to do when we’re not playing games.

I think the future of expressive, improvisational, conscious computing will be found at the intersection of personal sensing tools like Nike+ and Kinect, collective action tools like Twitter, and the playful engagement of gameful games. It won’t look like computing, and it won’t come in a box. It won’t be dumbed down for ‘ease of use’, it will be flowing experiences designed to make us more complex, capable and creative. It will augment our humanity, as embodied individuals embedded in a physical and social world.

Superstruct was created by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) as part of their annual Ten Year Forecast project. The design was led by Jane McGonigal aka @avantgame, well known for her cutting edge work in Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). From the FAQ:

“Superstruct is the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. By playing the game, you’ll help us chronicle the world of 2019 – and imagine how we might solve the problems we’ll face. Because this is about more than just envisioning the future. It’s about making the future, inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential.”

Superthreats and superpowers

The game revolved around the confluence of five major “superthreats” – pandemic disease, food system collapse, energy crisis, technological outlaws, and global refugee diasporas – which together threatened the very survival of the human race. Players worked to create stories, strategies and solutions to these threats, and earned achievement badges for demonstrating a range of collaborative skills. Not coincidentally, the skills required to succeed in Superstruct were drawn from earlier work at IFTF which identified a number of new competencies and collaborative abilities for a connected world. These ranged from skills like High Ping Quotient and Open Authorship, to Emergensight, “the ability to prepare for and deal with surprising results arising from coordination and collaboration at extreme scales”. These are the foundational skills of what IFTF calls Amplified Individuals, people who excel at navigating a fast changing, interconnected world through augmented social, collaborative and improvisational behaviors. For further reading, see the full Superstruct skills list and IFTF’s map of the Future of Work.

Generation ARG

There are a couple of intertwined ideas here that you should take note of. The first is the concept of large-scale distributed collective action, where hundreds or thousands of strangers come together online and cooperate to solve complex, multifaceted problems. In the same way that Gen Y employees brought new communication practices like IM, blogs and wikis into the workplace, the next generation of workers will have expectations and expertise in global cooperation honed in ARGs and MMOGs, along with public social performance practices learned from Facebook, Twitter et al. And like their predecessors, they will probably experience frustration with less collaborative, less open colleagues and managers, and they will face pushback from IT departments struggling to maintain control over tools and enforce secure network boundaries.

Serious games

The second idea is the use of game mechanisms – missions, achievements, badges, leveling and such – as a way to make activities more engaging, satisfying and impactful. Game mechanisms are increasingly being put to work as a way to tap into the focus, goal orientation, commitment and flow that gamers experience in play, but aimed at contributions with real world impact. The field of ‘serious games’ is making significant progress, led by researchers such as Byron Reeves at Stanford, Liz Lawley at RIT, and Ian Bogost at Georgia Tech.

‘A crash course in changing the world’

If you want to get firsthand experience with a global collective action game, join us March 3 – May 12, 2010 for EVOKE, an alternate reality game designed to help empower young people around the world, and especially in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most pressing problems: hunger, poverty, disease, war and oppression, water access, education, climate change. EVOKE is a project for the World Bank Institute, the learning and knowledge arm of the World Bank. As creative director McGonigal says, “We consider it a crash course in changing the world.” I hope to see you there.