 So, the title of my talk is Wasting Pixel, and I'm going to try and practice what I preach and leave a lot of white space up there. Okay, a little bit about me. I do a lot of different things, consulting, blogging. I've spent about 10 years in technology and startup, big company and academic environments. For the past year or so, I've been on my own, mainly consulting independent, independent consulting and writing, and one of the places where I blog is Forbes, and I wrote an article there where I came up with the phrase public computing, and that's how Martin found me and asked me to speak at this session. So you've seen a lot of speakers at this conference. They all seem to do really exciting stuff, amazing stuff. I'm more in the category of the people who kind of free ride along and with brilliant 2020 hindsight come and try and explain what's going on after it's all happened. So, public computing, what do I mean by that? So I mean the word public in two senses of the word. One is public as in public utilities, electricity, sewage, that sort of sense, an intersection of technology infrastructure and human habitation like cities and so forth. And the other public is in the sense of extrapolation from personal and social computing. So if you think about the trajectory of computing, we started with PC's personal computing, which most of us thought of as our personal devices. Then we moved on to the social computing era and the software stuff was happening on the web, but in terms of devices, I think of the tablet as the quintessential social computing device because it's something that you don't use as personally as you use your laptop, for example. You might bring up like a page or a picture and hand your tablet to somebody to take a look. I've seen people who have tablets lying around their living room or offices, so it's much more of a communal device. So personal computing, it's your private stuff. Social computing, it's something you do with friends and family. Public computing is what you do with strangers and the infrastructure for that obviously is whatever exists in public spaces like the monitors over there, touchable big screens in public spaces and so forth. And when I started thinking about this idea of public computing, I was trying to think of what's sort of the high concept, the design principle that can help us think more, most effectively about the idea of public computing. And I was drawn to this quote from Alan Kaye. Raise your hand if you've heard this before. Alan Kaye's idea that we should waste bits. Who has heard the phrase? Okay, so Kaye was one of the personal computing pioneers in the 70s at Park and he was one of the leading figures who led the transition from an era where computing was a scarce resource where you had to go at midnight to the computing center with a bunch of punch cards and really compete for a scarce resource to an era where there was basically a lot of computing power and Alan Kaye's big insight from a user experience point of view was that you really should start thinking in terms of wasting bits. It's no longer a scarce resource that has to be conserved. It's something that can be wasted and you can start doing frivolous things like it like drawing icons, making the screen pretty with a blue color instead of having a monochrome screen, that sort of thing. And I've been thinking a lot about this phrase for six months or so now and I've really concluded that this is one of the most powerful principles in human civilization. A civilization is defined by the resources it can waste. So if you were at the Africa and China presentations earlier, I was really impressed but I was also at the same time shocked at living in the West. We don't think about these things because things like electricity, communication bandwidth, they're things we can waste so we don't have to think about it so our life gets simplified. So the things we can do are defined by the things we can waste and wasting bits is something that started in the 70s and the same principle applies to new resources that come online. Screens are more at a micro level pixels are something that used to be very scarce. We used to have like tiny screens. Now there's screens everywhere. If there's like 300 people in this room, each of you has probably one or 1.5 screens on you at this point. There's two big LCD monitors right there and there's that screen. So pixels are going through their own sort of Moore's Law variant and Sri who's going to speak later will have more to say on like how the costs are actually dropping but from the point of view of design and user experience, I think it's really useful to wrap your mind around the idea that pixels might effectively become as cheap as paint. They might become a resource you can waste. So I think the overarching design principle for living in a screens world is waste pixels. Okay, so why should we waste pixels? So let me try and illustrate with an example. How many of you have seen this web page? Raise your hands. Okay, so this is the famous million dollar web page which is a thousand by thousand screen. The guy was selling a pixel for a dollar each. This is scarcity thinking around pixels and it looks absurd to us. I mean, you can't, it's like a confusion and chaos of colors and it's absurd when you compare it to Google. That's not a one billion, one million dollar page. That's a 24 billion dollars a year page and most of the pixels are wasted. So this is what I think of as an abundance mindset around pixels. And of course, I'm making a little bit of a glib argument here. There's a lot more going on behind that one page. But the great scarcity and abundance behave depends on your perspective rather than literal things like how much advertising you can jam into a pixel. This is the most powerful advertising entity in the world right now and it doesn't try to do this. It leaves most spaces empty. So when you think of public computing, I think of it at a big picture level as trying to complete this ratio or, sorry, analogy equation where on the web we went from like the crazy chaos as a joke to Google, which is the truly effective model. Look at our physical environment and places where there's a lot of displays kind of look like the picture on the left which maps to the absurd million dollar page up there. But we really don't know what the world might look like once we really start thinking of pixels as something you can waste. But presumably it'll be something that follows the design principles of Google more than the million dollar web page. So why do we get trapped into this scarcity mindset and why do we create things like these million dollar pixel pages? And I think it's because we like to focus on interesting. Interesting to me is information density. For example, each of us in this session has 15 minutes so I'm speaking relatively fast. If I had an hour, I'd go much longer. I'd take longer pauses. We focus on interesting because interesting is the way our brains are wired to work around scarce resources. And what happens when you apply this scarcity mindset to screens everywhere? So this is something called the Fremont Street experience. I'm from Las Vegas. This is in Las Vegas. It's this huge warehouse-sized entertainment complex. That thing is probably about three times the size of this building. The entire ceiling, it's an arched ceiling, is covered in LED pixels. So I don't know, Sri probably knows the records on this, but this is probably one of the largest screens in the world. And because it's Las Vegas and the only thing they can think of when they have this much real estate is to try and go nuts with it, they have rock performances on the ceiling every night and psychedelic light shows. And I think this is good for Vegas, but for the rest of the world and the screens world, this is absolutely the wrong design principle to follow. This is closer to where I think we should be headed. Anybody recognize this picture? Raise your hand if you've seen this. It's quite recent. OK, so this is the famous MIT hack. The students took over a building and replaced an entire wall of windows with LED panels and turned the building into a giant Tetris game. Now, this is remarkable because it reminds me of Alan Kay's approach to wasting computing, the processing power in the 70s, where he said, all right, let's start doing frivolous things, which are actually really serious because the moment you start wasting things and get frivolous with them, that's how you catalyze creativity around a newly abundant resource. But for the most part, people are still going after interesting and this is one of the best and worst things that's going on right now. I think Google Glass is a phenomenal piece of hardware. All this augmented reality stuff, head-up display, amazing stuff. But what I'd really like to see is how we would use it if it were truly a non-scarce ubiquitous resource. But if you saw this video at the Google I.O. conference recently, they had these guys wearing the Google Glass' skydiving from a plane onto the top of the conference center. Then they rode a bicycle across the roof of the building and rappelled down. And all the time Google Hangout was running and they were talking to each other and it was very impressive and interesting, but it struck me as completely out of this world and sort of the wrong approach to user experience. So the other side of this idea that we focus on interesting is that we make fun of boring and we even have a phrase for this when it comes to surfaces, we have this phrase, it's as boring as watching paint dry. And I actually Googled this, trying to look for images. There are very few images of people watching paint dry, but this blogger apparently ran an actual contest and this is one of the entries of somebody watching paint dry. But paint is actually the right example in my mind about how to think about ubiquitous resources because you don't have to like pack everything you want into it. You can just say, all right, all I'm gonna do with a wall of paint is make it yellow to foster attention or maybe blue to calm me down. I don't know, there'll be designers here who know more about that than me, but that's kind of the mindset we have to think of because that's where life happens. Life happens around the more boring aspects of user experience around ubiquitous resources. And to give you an example of the sort of challenge you might wanna start thinking about, if you've ever stepped out of an elevator in a hotel, you'll often notice that there's a mirror there. Why is the mirror there? Because people, when they press the button for the elevator, they tend to get really impatient and keep jabbing at it, waiting for the elevator to come. And designers discovered that instead of doing complicated programming logic with the elevators, all they need to do is put a mirror across from the elevators and people start doing that and they occupy all the time they need. And if you think about applying scarcity versus abundance mindset to this surface and replacing it with an LED screen, for example, what would you do with it? Would you show like a riot of television ads because attention is scarce and so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy? Or would you do something like, all right, it's an LED screen, but it still behaves like a mirror, but maybe superimposes a new hairstyle on you, something like that. So it's hard thinking around resources you can waste. So this is an example of normal and boring. Another is street signs for traffic. This is a crossway walk sign in America. I don't know if it's the same in Sweden, but this is not something I want to be made interesting. I don't want this to become like a TED talk of jazz and so forth. This has one function, it's got to get me safely across the street. But again, when you start thinking of this sort of pixel becoming very ubiquitous and cheap, you can start thinking of all the crazy but boring things you can do with it. Like a lot of us walked from the hotel about a mile away to this venue this morning. I would like to press a button on my smartphone and have the street signs give me little very muted personalized directions to walk to the venue. Like in a little arrow turn right here, turn left here. That could be done. It would be kind of boring, but that's what I think public computing with ubiquitous screens should look like. So boring is normal. Here's a very boring bathroom. I like this sort of thing. So not much going on. The information density is very low. There's a few colors. There's a few platonic shapes. But the point is we like it this way. Would you really want your bathroom to be completely plastered wall-to-wall with advertising? No. So you have to rethink this around pixels. So there are smarter things you can do with pixels that you cannot do with paint or wallpaper or more traditional media. But the principle that you should keep it boring still applies because we like it that way. So the challenge becomes, how do we do smart boring? How do we create a new normal that's not trying to excite and stimulate you all the time? And how do we waste pixels? That's, of course, the overarching question. So I'll give you a couple of examples that I think represent the right kind of thinking here. So doing nothing beautifully. I'm sure you guys have seen apps like this. This one is called invisibility. And it basically does simulated transparency. And I think this is a brilliant use of what the iPad can do. And imagine if you could use this to create simulated windows. We are in this room here, and that wall faces an interior, but we could put up an LED panel and make it look like a window. Or if you're in a museum, you could make that like an x-ray device that looks behind, say, maybe there's a submarine or ship that you're walking through as a museum. You can look behind and see the wiring and plumbing. So these are sort of the things you can do if you do nothing really well. Another is wasting time well. So you can clearly see I don't believe in attention scarcity or attention economy. So this is a screen that you'll find at the Los Angeles International Airport. It's a big touch screen and it has a Chinese Tangram puzzle on it. And each time I go through LAX, I wanna play this game, but there's always a bunch of kids milling around trying to play the game. So I never get to play it, but this is sort of the right approach to thinking because we think of attention as scarce, but once we start thinking in terms of normal, boring, everyday interactions, children playing, you get things like this. Another good example is every sort of surface covering medium in history starting with cave paintings has always attracted graffiti. If you go to cave murals, you'll see graffiti. X loves Y, that kind of thing. And of course, we have to invent digital graffiti. So I hope next year when we have this conference again, we have this big digital graffiti wall where we can all scribble, right? Okay, so let me try and contextualize this for Sweden. This whole design challenge of doing nothing well and wasting pixels, I think Americans would be really bad at it because we like to kind of jam-pack everything. But Sweden I think is already really good at it. So I haven't yet, this is my first visit to Scandinavia and I'm gonna stock home next and I mean to go and see this. It's some designers wanted to get people walking on stairs more than taking the escalator as a health thing and they made a small change. They made the stairs look like a piano keyboard and when you step on them, they make the musical notes. And when they did this, they found that behavior changed and a lot more people started taking the stairs. So this is the kind of really muted background, wasting pixels type of thinking that I think Swedes are really good at. And of course Ikea is I think a byword for boring in America but it's boring but everybody buys it, everybody uses it to furnish their homes and I think that's its trend, the fact that it's boring and normal. Okay, so the big principle here and I'm hoping Dan will have more to say on this but I really think information overload and the attention economy are missframings of important human behaviors. It's really a matter of perspective, empty spaces, negative spaces, transparency, things like that. It's all about working with the attention economy in a way that you just let it go and that's kind of how you actually deal with attention. So I'll stop here.