"The people in charge of most free and open source software products tend to have poor taste in user interfaces; people with good taste in user interface design are seldom in charge of open source software projects.

"Put another way, if you have to ask for better design, you will lose. You need to be in a position to demand it." –Daring Fireball

As an example, consider the YBox, a small electronic device for creating textual television channels. The first version of the YBox was created by Uncommon Projects for Yahoo's first hack day in 2006. Yahoo sponsored the creation of 80 kits to be given away at the Maker Faire in 2007. The YBox was then redesigned by Robert Quattlebaum, dramatically lowering the cost. The design was further refined by ladyada, who now sells it as a kit.

In this example, the open-source nature of the design enabled multiple people to improve and redistribute it, as in open-source software. Notice, however, that these improvements were not accumulated in a single, canonical version of the product; instead, each iteration remained as an independent design, documented on its own location. In open-source hardware, a fork is the rule, not the exception.

Also significant is that without the economic assistance or incentive to produce and distribute kit versions of the hardware, the YBox would have remained nothing but a cool hack: a singular instance to read about online, but not use or improve. After the product is designed, built, and tested, the distribution remains – unlike software, which only needs to be put online. This is where the entrepreneur gets involved, without whose investment (of both time and money), the freedoms of the design would go unrealized, just as those of open-source software require a developer to manifest.

Some see this as a weakness of open-source hardware: the process inevitably requires money, and thus can never provide the same broad accessibility as does open-source software. I would argue that it is only a difference: some people can invest money but not time, and others the reverse – either, given the appropriate freedoms, can create a vibrant ecosystem. As we gain time and experience with open-source hardware, we will begin to understand more of the ways in which its operation parallels and diverges from that of open-source software. Both, I think, have a vibrant future.

In The City in History (1961), Lewis Mumford describes the effect of the increasingly bureaucratic nature of business - enabled by technologies of communication and control - on the growth of cities:

"Plainly no great corporate enterprise with a worldwide network of agents, correspondents, market outlets, factories, and investors could exist without relying upon the services of an army of patient, clerkly routineers in the metropolis: stenographers, filing clerks, and book-keepers, office managers, sales managers, advertising directors, accountants, and their varied assistants, right up to the fifth vice-president whose name or O.K. sets the final seal of responsibility upon an action.

"The housing of this bureaucracy in office buildings and tenements and residential suburbs constituted one of the major tasks of metropolitan expansion. Their transportation to and from work, within a limited time-span, raised one of the difficult technical problems that confronted the city planner and the engineer. And not merely did the bureaucracy itself require office space and domestic space: the by-products of its routine demanded an increasing share of the new quarters: files, vaults, place for live storage and dead storage, parade grounds and cemeteries of documents, where the records of business were alphabetically arrayed, with an eye to the possibility of future exploitation, future reference, future lawsuits, future contracts.

"This age found its form, as early as the eighteen-eighties in America, in a new type of office building: symbolically a sort of vertical human filing case, with uniform windows, a uniform façade, uniform accommodations, rising floor by floor in competition for light and air and above all financial prestige with other skyscrapers." (p. 535)

Here we have technology driving business, and business, in turn, shaping the city: uniform, imposing, monotonous; the organization man with his procedures and his house in suburbia; business governed from the top and the growth of cities too; the importance of conformity in work, in home, in life.

The rise of the suburbs was driven not by the technology of house-building, nor that of transportation, but by the secondary consequences of the technologies of bureaucracy. We could long have built isolated sub-divisions of identical houses, but never before would we have lived in them. It required a population with little choice in the location or nature of their housing and jobs to give rise to this conurban sprawl. The suburbs were not the direct result of technology but of the patterns of employment, social mobility, and lifestyle it enabled.

This holds for digital technologies as well. Consider their immediate effects on the city. We find things to do online rather than in the local weekly, look for an apartment on craigslist instead of the classifieds, but this has little impact on the the activities or the apartments. The internet, mobile phones, in-car navigation systems, and the rest of today's electronic devices don't make it any more attractive to live in a city - after all, they work in the suburbs too - nor do they significantly alter the form that the city can take. The highway, the subway, the elevator, the electrical grid, the sewage system: none of these are digital technologies. The houses we live in, the way we get to work, the third places we inhabit: these are shaped by social and political forces that influenced only indirectly by technology.

Given all this, why the current resurgence in urban life? For the answer, we turn to Richard Florida and his book The Rise of the Creative Class. In it, he describes the invigorating impact of a new class of creative professionals on the desirability and vitality of traditional city living. This growing group of educated, selective professionals change jobs every few years, choosing not just a company, but also a place. Not content with any location, they look for one that offers a active nightlife, vibrant culture, and other amenities. No longer forced to live in the suburbs and commute to an corporate office park - or to work in a factory and live nearby - people are increasingly choosing not to. More and more, the city is becoming the center of the enterprise, its employees, and their homes and lives. The increased professional freedom enabled by technology thereby fuels the rise in popularity and affluence of city neighborhoods. It is this, not the ways that we use digital devices in the city, that is technology's true impact on urban life.

To me, the definition of "open-source hardware" is straightforward, and analogous to that of open-source or free software. It is, simply, the provision of the digital artifacts necessary to reproduce, understand, and modify a piece of hardware. As in software, the open-source design may depend on closed or proprietary components (e.g. an operating system or a integrated circuit) so long as those may be incorporated into the copy or derivative of the original open-source work. I would exclude, however, those products for which the information provided allows only for the use or extension, but not the reproduction or modification of the original. It's not enough to tell people how your hardware works, you have to enable them to build it for themselves.

Finally, a few notes from my experiences on Arduino, an open-source hardware and software platform for electronics prototyping. Open-source does not entail democracy: you can make your own, so you don't (necessarily) get a vote on how I make mine. In open-source hardware, forking can be a valuable method for making more products available to the community, rather than a last resort in the face of irresolvable differences. Additionally – and this is crucial when many entities sell competing versions of compatible products – open-source does not imply the right to another group's identity. As with open-source software, you can use a project's work as the basis for another, but you can't claim that it's part of the original.

For more information, check out ladyada's take or see the short but suggestive write-up at openhardware.org.

I hope to write more about topics related to open-source hardware, but felt it was important to start by defining the term. Check back for more.

With direct contact and face-to-face association inhibited as far as possible, all knowledge and direction can be monopolized by central agents and conveyed through guarded channels, too costly to be utilized by small groups or private individuals. To exercise free speech in such a scattered, dissociated community, one must 'buy time' on the air or 'buy space' in the newspaper. Each member of Suburbia becomes imprisoned by the very separation that he has prized; he is fed through a narrow opening: a telephone line, a radio band, a television circuit. (The City in History, 1961, pp. 512-13)

Here, perhaps, we get a glimpse of the preconditions for the industrial information economy that is given such a drubbing in Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks. Had we maintained - in lieu of suburbia - a pattern of urban form that provided the individual with the opportunity for first-hand participation in the substance of society, would we have been needed the palliative of a corporate mass media? Mumford's example reminds us that in the course of our meditations on the impact of technology, we need always recall the social and environmental contexts that gave rise to those technologies, and to consider the related significance of both for the nature of our lives.

Magic is the name we give to things we don't understand, things we can't control. It is a mysterious power beyond the capacity of most, mastered only with difficulty and scholarship. Harry Potter had seven years (and seven books) worth of study in it. Why should we need such an education to operate the things around us? They are complex enough without the addition of a shroud of obscurity and unpredictability. The goal of interaction design and the interaction designer is to reveal and explain the functioning of the objects in our world, not commingle them with the primal and eternal forces of the universe.

It is a failure, not a goal, for our products to seem magical. It means that we don't understand them, that we are afraid to manipulate them for fear of what might happen. It means that we sense strange things beneath the surface whose purpose and ways we cannot fathom. Think of the person who dares not click an unknown button because they don't know what might happen. They are constrained by the precise limits of their past experience. Is this so different from the aura of fear and respect afforded to mystic runes or an enchanted potion? Magic means meddling with forces you do not understand and cannot control.

When we design, we should think of the human, the familiar, the natural. We should strive to create products which match our expectations and experiences with the world and its contents. We should be able to comprehend the connections between action and reaction, between one system and other. Otherwise, we will dwell in a world of mysteries - mysteries that go by the name of magic.

“And in the absence of miles of cheap drawing paper, architects, much against their wills no doubt, had to rely on the workmen as being possessed of a considerable deal of knowledge, initiative, sensibility, and responsibility.

“You had to leave a certain amount of responsibility to the workman simply because you couldn't draw everything out on paper.

“You couldn't draw everything simply because there wasn't paper enough.

“Rolls of ‘detail paper’ didn't exist!”

From: “Sculpture on Machine-Made Buildings”, 1936 (in It All Goes Together: Selected Essays by Eric Gill, 1944).

The current age of calm technology.
Originally uploaded by dam.

This is not the only possibility. Although the screen is two-dimensional, with fixed resolution and spectrum, it is capable of displaying any image that fits those pixels. One can imagine any number of organizing metaphors for its interface. The main constraint is no longer (if it ever was) the capabilities of the computer, but the limits of our understanding. As we've grown more comfortable with the abstractions of computing, interfaces have begun to represent these abstractions in multiple ways, according to our needs and context. Now that we know what a file is, we can recognize it as an icon, in a list, or as an image of its contents. Interface elements need no longer appear as solid objects, but are often transparent, animated, morphing. The interface becomes not architecture but spectacle.

This new breed of interface is again exemplified by Apple. Its ideas appear to some extent in Leopard, but it's the iPhone that provides the best example. It has no windows, no menus, no pointer - three of the four hallmarks of the old WIMP paradigm. Even the icons have been transformed from physical objects to images: not things but signs. Consider the interaction between applications. Rather than windows overlapping in space, the iPhone shows one at a time, filling the screen. To switch between them, you tunnel back to the home screen and select another. There's no geographic relation between them; each exists in its own parallel universe. Tap on a photo in an album and the thumbnails slide smoothly off to left - but flick the photo to the right and it's another image that enters from the left, not the thumbnails. The flicking motion seems "real", but what physical object behaves in a similar way? This is an interface that draws on basic notions of position, motion, and continuity - but in a way that's unique to the screen and dependent on our acceptance of a more abstract relation to the underlying virtuality. It relates most closely to film and special effects, in which a logical consistency is secondary to visual continuity. We have finally begun to accept the screen as its own medium and design our interfaces according to its logic.

Wow. Someone went ahead and made a graphical programming language for Arduino. From the blog entry:

Finally I can release an Alpha Version of ArduinoBlocks. Only the Windows Version ist availible for download as you have to compile it for the different OSs and also for the different Mac processors. The idea is to have a visual blocks language for children that is translated into Arduino code.

I managed to get it running on my Mac by copying the .jars into a copy of my Arduino 0007 directory. Here's a program to blink an LED:

This is a lot like the programming interface for the Pico Crickets, but not quite as refined.