ia play

One of the themes I’m always interested is the way some things seem new but have clear echoes in the past. I was fascinated (and slightly horrified) to read this history of computing article: Factory concepts and practices in software development (Open Library).

Most of the examples are describing problems with IT projects in the 1960s but they could as easily be applied to the projects I’ve worked on over the last decade. The table summarising aspects of the  1968 Nato Report on Software Engineering Problems (PDF) is scarily applicable.

• Lack of understanding in system requirements on the part of customers and designers.
• Large gaps between estimates of costs and time with actual expenditures due to poor estimating techniques, failure to allow time for changes in requirements, and division of programming tasks into blocks before the divisions of the system are well-enough understood to do this properly.
• Large variations, as much as 26:1 in one study, in programmers’ productivity levels.
• Difficulty of dividing labor between design and production (coding), since design-type decisions must still be made in coding.
• Difficulty in monitoring progress in a software project, since “program construction is not always a simple progression in which each act of assembly represents a distinct forward step.”
• Rapid growth in the size of software systems.
• Poor communication among groups working on the same project, exacerbated by too much uncoordinated or unnecessary information, and a lack of automation to handle necessary information.
• Large expense of developing on-line production control tools.
• Difficulty of measuring key aspects of programmer and system performance.
• A tradition among software developers of not writing systems “for practical use,” but trying to write new and better systems, so that they are always combining research, development, and production in a single project, which then makes it difficult to predict and manage.
• Rapid growth in the need for programmers and insufficient numbers of adequately trained and skilled programmers.
• Difficulty of achieving sufficient reliability (reduced errors and error tolerance) in large software systems.
• Dependence of software on hardware, which makes standardization of software difficult across different machines.
• Lack of inventories of reusable software components to aid in the building of new programs.
• Software maintenance costs often exceeding the cost of the original system development.

Source: Naur and Randell.

Must remember to ask my dad about his  early programming experiences and see if this fits.

The Violent Highway is unusual for TV programmes about violent crime. Instead of an unquestioning “everything is getting worse” angle, the documentary instead looks at crime past and present, through the device of a single London street.

“the film recreates key incidents taken from 300 years of muggings, wife-beatings, pub brawls and serial killings. Historians, psychologists, residents of The Highway and former gang members discuss whether we are more or less violent than we used to be, and what this street can reveal about the violence in all of us.”

At one point the narrator starts the usual hackneyed point about how violent modern TV and video games are, but this only leads into Steven Pinker pointing out how we take pleasure in the violence in  Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, and in murder mysteries too.

BBC Two Programmes – The Violent Highway.

I’m never quite sure I’ve ‘got’ what Bruce Sterling is getting at…but there’s always something in his non-fiction writing that I feel the need to capture, come back to, mull over. I never read his sci-fi, I picked up one of his novels in the charity box at work and flicked through it. The prose didn’t seem like something I wanted to spend my time with. I’m not sure if that was hasty.

Still, his article in interactions magazine has the usual hints at possible wisdom. Or maybe just comforting statements of the obvious, although he almost certainly doesn’t intend them to be comforting!

“Below the professional level of for-profit publishing, the subculture of science fiction fans exploited early, DIY duplication technologies: Gestetners, hectograph. There were letter-writing campaigns, amateur press associations, local writers groups, regional science fiction conventions galore. One might even argue that contemporary Web culture looks and behaves much like 1930s science fiction fandom, only digitized and globalized.”

“Digital media is much more frail and contingent than print media. I rather imagine that people will be reading H.P. Lovecraft-likely the ultimate pulp-magazine science fiction writer-long after today’s clumsy, bug-ridden MMORPGs are as dead as the Univac.”

“Experience designers are a tiny group of people with a radically universalized prospectus”

“I scarcely know what to do about this. As Charles Eames said, design is a method of action. Literature is a method of meaning and feeling. Hearteningly, I do know how I feel about this situation. I even have some inkling of what it means”

via interactions magazine.

I love Found Objects of Industry for the folding beds and benches, the industrial labs and assorted paraphenalia. But mostly for this cabinet with the little drawers.

Yet another I want.

Idler editor Tom Hodgkinson follows up How to be Idle with How to be Free in which he exhorts us to live simpler lives, get off the capitalist hamster wheel and indulge in a bit of anarchism. Jolly medieval peasants seem to feature a lot. As reviewers have pointed out, he does seem to forget an awful lot of the nasty bits about the medieval period.

And for Hodgkinson, governments are responsible for wars and taxes but he conveniently ignores the NHS (which is the bit that vexes me about all this self-sufficiency stuff…. I’d still quite like having highly trained medical staff around and I don’t think they want to be paid in turnips or with a nice tune on the ukelele).

I felt compelled to follow this up with Medieval Lives by Terry Jones, which evened things out a bit with a healthy dose of corruption, pestilance and violence.

Undoubtedly family business represents the most lasting type of business. The expert in family business, Professor Willian O’Hara, in one of his books mentioned about family business the following: “Before the multinational corporation, there was family business. Before the Industrial Revolution, there was family business. Before the enlightenment of Greece and the empire of Rome, there was family business.”

from The 100 Oldest Companies in the World

The oldest UK company in the list is Brooke’s Mill in Yorkshire which dates back to 1541. It is still owned by the same family but is no longer a wool mill, nor do the buildings date to 1541. These days it is a “Heritage Office Park”. The name, family and location persist but everything else has changed.

On an average weekday the New York Times contains more information than any contemporary of Shakespeare’s would have acquired in a lifetime. – Anonymous

What does this mean? It seems to be comparing apples with oranges. A reader of the NY Times doesn’t acquire all the information in the NY Times in any meaningful sense.

We have access to far more information, and much more readily, than any contemporary of Shakespeare. But the information we have actually acquired? And understood? And been able to fit into the bigger scheme of things? Or indeed remember a day later?

One of the goals of personas is to challenge stereotypes and preconceptions. This worked nicely when we were working on persona creation for the redesign of bbc.co.uk.
The personas were all based on research from our audience research team but the team was questioning the pensioner profiles for using too much technology, complaining that “my gran is nothing like that”. This is when you have to point out that the pensioners AR were talking about were 65. That makes them most of my colleagues’ parents not our grandparents. And reminds us all we’re getting old.

The research was nicely validated by an interview we did a few weeks later with a recently retired librarian. She was using digital television (including catch-up TV), mobile phone (texting and taking photos), digital radio, PC (internet & email), digital camera & skype with a web-cam. She’s wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about technology but was heavily influenced by her children and her need to stay in touch with family elsewhere in the world.

But even when we’ve recalibrated our understanding of who pensioners are….it is still a common cliche to hear web workers challenge something complex in a product on the grounds that “my mum couldn’t use that”.

Now my mum and dad are retired computer programmers. They’re seriously old school. When I was a kid I played with abandoned punch-cards and that green bar printout paper. Dinner time conversations involved mainframes and COBOL. I thought this was all normal for grown-ups.

Given how extraordinarily geeky you needed to be in early days to get into programming, they’re probably more technically able than many of today’s geeks. So my mum could almost certainly use that. If she wanted to.

Now my sister… she thinks the rest of us Harvey’s are weird. She’s a much better touchstone for the real world.

Also on the Thinking Allowed ‘Hoodies’ episode that I mentioned a while back was a piece on city planning.The piece covers ‘the traditional and futuristic notions of what makes a good city’ and decisions that we now perceive to have been destructive but at the time were motivated by a desire to get rid of Victoriana, to build better roads etc.

It seems that one generation’s modernisation is often the next’s wanton destruction. The romanticism that my generation has for things from my grandparents time horrifies my parents. They see it as a retrograde attitude. They have none of the nostalgia for period properties & antique fittings, they merely associate them with the hardships and limitations of their childhoods (cold & drafty houses, filled with dark wood and laboursome devices). Their values are of the 60s, warm, clean, light modern houses, scandanavian furniture and labour-saving, electronic devices.

My mother-in-law was amused to see we have a manual coffee-grinder and politely inquired if we knew there were electric versions available. We got it partly because we’ve been looking at our electricity consumption and also trying to buy devices that last longer. I’ve been increasing shocked at how many electronic devices I end up chucking. But there’s also a kind of motivation that I call the From Scratch Diet i.e. you can eat as much as you like of anything that you make from scratch. Sod Atkins…bread can’t make you fat if you had to knead the bloody dough yourself. Not that coffee makes you fat but you get the idea.

Mum just thinks we’re on some weird puritanical kick.