Who's Top Dog in the Space of Flows?

Doors of Perception 6, Amsterdam, 11-13 November, 2000

Jamie King reviews Doors of Perception 6, which took place in Amsterdam from 11-13 November, 2000, and wonders whether the twenty-first century will see the emergence of a new ruling class in the information economy.

TNhere's a proposition that used to be bandied about quite frequently, to the effect that the geeks (whether meek or otherwise) were soon to inherit the earth. This idea, possibly originating in Douglas Coupland's 1995 novel, Microserfs, gained considerable currency as, in the closing moments of the twentieth century, the newly formed 'dot com sector' became the darling of the world's financial markets. When geek overlord Bill Gates was declared the richest man in the world on the back of his Microsoft stocks, the Couplandian prophecy seemed fulfilled; nerds everywhere began to rub their hands with glee at the thought that, after all those years as pariahs, they would now find themselves rising magically to the top of the socio-economic heap.

At the beginning of the twenty first century, however, Coupland's dictum has started to look a little rickety, the geeks perhaps a little disappointed. As Lawrence Lessig argues insistently in a variety of essays, code is always going to be the structuring fact of life online, and those who know how to manipulate and massage it are not going to find themselves out of a job in the next few years - not until, that is, the code learns how to write itself. Yet a class of programmer-kings has not emerged, only a highly paid itinerant labour force that moves laterally from back-end system to back-end system, amassing zeroes in the personal bank account, perhaps, but rarely ascending the corporate hierarchy. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell, may well believe that the term 'geek' is a 'badge of honour', but he knows that as a geek executive he is the exception that proves the rule - by and large, geek skills just don't translate into the boardroom. 'You have to find a way to give [programmers] promotions without turning them into managers,' Schmidt says, 'because they are not going to make very good executives.' Indeed, Novell has gone as far as to create a 'dual career ladder' - one for programmers, and one for everybody else - which steers geek staff towards high salaries and peer respect and away from strategic and managerial responsibility.

Yet the new economy, even as it staggers under the flurry of bizarrely wrongheaded dot-comedies formed in the last years of the twentieth century, presents challenges in understanding and handling information flow that the geeks looked uniquely placed to address. If programmers aren't going to switch from scripting servlets to strategising and architecting systems, who is?

Step forward the new candidate for imminent earthly dominance: the designer. At the Doors of Perception conference in Amsterdam this year, the avowed theme of 'Lightness' really played second fiddle to the sensation that the designer's star was very much in the ascendancy in the information world. There was an undeniable mood of confidence and swagger, given voice by Rick Robinson, Chief Experience Officer at Internet strategy consultants and 'solution providers' Sapient. Designers, Robinson confirmed, were now to be found not at their monitors typesetting the company brochure, but in the boardroom, heading up strategy and innovation departments - calling, in other words, the shots.

I won't bore you or myself by trying to provide hard evidence for this shift - it's just a working hypothesis, and you can trawl the net yourself for examples of designer-as-CEO (Robinson being just one). As a seam of anecdotal evidence, however, the presentations at this year's Doors were rich. As Ole Bouman, architectural historian and editor-in-chief of Archis magazine showed, designers and architects have been thinking about flows (of data, people, things) in the world since the very beginning: that, of course, has been one of their primary functions. Now, suddenly, they are in demand to design for whole new mode, this so-called 'space of flows', in which the effective architecting of information is held to be of critical importance. The metaphor of space is today's paradigm for understanding networks, and those who have specialised in space are naturally coming into their own.

Now, this hypothesis is guaranteed to annoy the Danny O' Briens and David Greens of this world, whose Need To Know, constantly laments the rise of the designer-type (complete with three-quarter-length trousers, Bhudda hairdo, scooter and useless WAP accessories) within the new media industry in the UK. One gets the sense that some geeks believe the only people who have a right to work (or, indeed, think) in the industry should be those who know their way around a Unix box and aren't shy of rummaging in the CGI bin. Untrue: not only do programmers often suffer from a complete lack of communication skills, but being so highly versed in the detail of code, they are often unable to render their knowledge into a broader structural, social, political or economic context. (Although admittedly when they do, as in the case of a Richard Stallman, the results can be powerful.)

It is precisely here that the designer is coming into play. As Hani Rashid, founder of New York architecture crew Asymptote, presented the company's recent project for the New York Stock Exchange (an impressive 'theater of operations' for the floor of the exchange,) the Doors audience saw precisely how an architect's approach to usability could translate into the 'virtual space' of the market. For Rashid, information technology is indeed changing the way in which we conceive of and engineer spatiality, allowing Asymptote to rework principles of architecture within the datasphere. Likewise, Lisa Strausfeld of InformationArt, another highly trained architect-turned-information-designer, showed off her information visualisation work for Quokka Sports, a live race viewer for its Championship Auto Racing Teams. In the innovative interface Strausfeld produced for the interpreting race results, we saw an approach which, again, showed the strength of a designer's eye for information systems.

So this 'space of flows' is something of a frontier for the designer, as conference organiser and 'First Perceptron' John Thackara intimated in his introduction to the event. 'In this new "design space",' Thackara said,

Thackara is, of course, uniquely placed gauge changes in the design industry. Having recently left the Netherlands Design Institute to produce the Doors conference as a private event, he stands at the epicentre of the information design mafia (and I mean that, sincerely, in the nicest possible way), which comprises the Royal College of Art's Computer Related Design (CRD) unit, the NDI, MIT's Media Lab, as well as companies such as IDEO and NCR's Knowledge Labs. At Doors of Perception there was the sense of an upping-of-stakes in this community. Gillian Crampton-Smith, formerly director of the CRD unit, was given a whole ten minutes to sell her new Italy-based Interaction Design Institute (IVREA), sponsored by Olivetti and Telecom Italia. Janet Abrams, meanwhile, herself a sometime director of the Doors conference and editor of the journal IF/THEN: Design Implications of New Media, announced that she had been hired to start an information design institute at the University of Minnesota, which would look at 'broadening public understanding of the role of design in everyday life' and launching a multi-media communications effort to 'explore the challenge of creating everyday 'intelligent' products'; it already has $1.1million of public funding to work with, and if the experience at the RCA's CRD department is anything to go by, Abrams will have little problem attracting funding from commercial sources as and when she needs it.

Little surprise, then, that a mood of salubrious optimism permeated Doors 6. Philips Electronics had left printed open invitations for work at its own design labs in Holland; business cards were exchanging hands with hitherto unseen frequency. But in the midst of it all, I struck up a conversation with one of the speakers, Stewart Butterfield, a new media designer and founder of the 5k design project, a self-confessed 'winner in the dot com lottery' who now spends his time flying around giving lectures and staying in swish hotels.

Having made this my subject of study for the last four years, I was pleased to agree with him. 'Cyberspace', 'virtual reality', 'the space of flows' - all these terms suggest, in varying degrees, spaces somehow apart from the everyday world - and as I have argued many times, our use of them in understanding the online experience has been instrumental in bringing into being an incoherent, patchy 'place' on the network, with all its mixed metaphors of 'pages', 'home', 'surfers', 'portals' and the like. For the rest of the conference, I fell to wondering whether designers' and architects' putative role as chief strategists of the information economy might only make sense for as long as this spatial metaphor holds in place. Cyberspace, the granddaddy of spatialising metaphors online, has been notable by its absence from new media conversations of late, and I am not at all sure that this is, as Butterfield seemed to be arguing, because the idea is so entrenched in our thinking that we don't need the term any more. If I was asked (not that it's likely) to give the Doors design mafia any advice, it would be along these lines: use your time at the top to focus on thinking beyond the 'space of flows' as a space apart - this is a conception, along with the term which underlies it, that's on its way out. Refuse to make wendy-houses for new media to play in. Instead, design us a way out of the tired spatial metaphor. You'll be designing your way back down the corporate hierarchy, of course. But everyone else will be a lot better off.