teve Mann is not recording me. This is unusual. Because we’re not meeting in person,I’m not captured by the computer he wears inside a pair of glasses,recording every aspect of his existence.In fact,in a strange reversal of events,I’m recording our phone conversation. Mann would say that I’m engaging in what he would call sousveillance—but more on that later.
Mann is a tireless inventor. Most of his ideas come to him in dreams and then he starts tinkering. A musical instrument that’s played with water? Check. It’s called ahydraulophone (pictured at right) and it began as a way to allow grown-ups to play in the water. A people-sorting machine that could be used in hospitals or airports where an infectious outbreak needs to be contained? Check. It’s called Deconcourse and it was recently presented on Capitol Hill as a model for how the nation’s hospitals should deal with decontamination.
Mann has worn a computer—rendering him a cyborg—for 30 years. The modern model,having evolved from a bulky backpack-based prototype,is integrated into a normal pair of eyeglasses and is meant to be a seamless extension of the wearer. It replaces cell phones,iPods and other technology as well as uses sensors to monitor the health and well-being of the wearer.
Why bother? Because walls have ears—and eyes. And so should we,says Mann.“All around us,we see technological changes in our environments.From washrooms with sensor-operated faucets and toilets to intelligent environments where buildings sense and respond to us. What hasn’t kept pace is technology on people.”
It’s a question of surveillance versus sousveillance. Surveillance,he says,is a larger entity watching a smaller entity—the camera on the ceiling recording events,for example. People have come to accept surveillance,but Mann wants them to start getting in on the action. Sousveillance,which means to watch from below,refers to the act of recording an activity that you’re participating in.
Much of Mann’s work has been about empowering people to conduct sousveillance,whether it’s through wearable computers or via glogging,an abbreviation of cyborg logging,where the participant in an activity records and broadcasts it as it happens.
There are practical applications.“If you look at the growing population of elderly,you can imagine that it won’t be long before everyone’s wearing some kind of memory prosthetic that helps them record what they see and do.”
But his work is not about technology,he insists. In fact,the Deconcourse began life in a gallery as an art installation.“Capturing life and sharing experience is universal and transcends technology,”he says.“People will use whatever medium is available today,next week,next year or in the next millennium.”
Is he an engineer or an artist? A scientist or an activist? He doesn’t care what you call him. For Mann,it’s all about fluidity,about “being undigital.”
“I always talk about fluidity versus digitization.I’m interested in undigital media—things that are continuous and free-flowing and interactional.”We tend to throw around the word “digital”as a synonym for high-tech. Mann sticks to the literal meaning of the word,which is to take information and compartmentalize or break it into smaller pieces.“The world has been digital for thousands of years,”he says.“The Greeks and Romans had a census,where they digitized people in a sense,where people were quantized or mapped.”
It’s easy to imagine Mann as a high-tech Little Dutch Boy with his finger in the dyke,holding back the forces of digitization as he insists on the primacy of human creativity and the importance of individual experience. Being undigital,”he says,“and transcending those boundaries is part of human nature.”
on Baecker is happy to leave technology design to someone else.
“My role is to take the technology that’s available and think up wild-eyed,crazy ideas of what we can do with it.”
He makes that sound funny,but he’s not kidding.
Take a look outside his office in UofT’s information technology headquarters,the Bahen Centre. All over the walls are detailed posters describing his current projects.He may call them “crazy ideas,”but they are,in fact,actually helping people.
One project—“Technology to Support Cognition and Combat Memory Impairments”—suggests how new media devices can be used by people who have cognitive impairments,such as amnesia or the early effects of Alzheimer’s disease,to manage their lives more effectively.
Another is ePresence,open-source software based on Baecker’s research that has recently resulted in a spin-off company formed to deliver ePresencesolutions. Deployed on six continents,ePresenceis a webcasting technology that is used by a variety of organizations to share live lectures,conferences and meetings.By way of example,Baecker calls up on screen two human-computer interaction consultants in Minneapolis giving a lecture to 20 students spread across Canada from Halifax to Vancouver. Not only do you see the lecture,but the screen also features a PowerPoint presentation and students can e-mail questions as the lecture progresses.“
There is no question that what we have done—me and a million others—has been for the benefit of society.That’s what drives me.”
Named by ACM SIGGRAPH (an international computer graphics society) as one of the 60 pioneers of computer graphics,Baecker got his start as a student at M.I.T.in the mid 1960s when he stumbled into a job at a lab where he built his first computer graphics program.“It was the classic ‘right place at the right time’story.They had me work with this amazing machine called a TX-2 and I’ve just carried on from that.”
What drew him into the field,however,was the relationship between humans and computers.His working philosophy today is informed by one of the great computer science innovators,J.C.R.Licklider.“In 1960 he wrote an article called Man-Computer Symbiosis.He envisioned a time when people and computers would work together to create things that neither could do alone.That really influenced me.”
With that in mind,Baecker formed U of T’s Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) in 1996.The virtual organization draws together faculty from a dizzying array of disciplines to design uses of digital media technology for a similarly broad palette of applications,and to think deeply about how the increasing use of digital media is changing us and the world. He also collaborates with scientists and graduate students at the Kunin-Lunenfeld Applied Research Unit at Baycrest,the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.
In fact,Baecker is a collaborator extraordinaire,placing a huge value on creating solutions by partnering with people like Baycrest neuropsychologist Brian Richards,social work professor Elsa Marziali,and the team of young new media experts he works with on ePresence.
As for Baecker’s next steps,he thinks back to his early days.“That TX-2 was three times the size of my office. Today,you can get something a hundred times better that is the size of your cell-phone.So,the technology keeps getting better.With that,we can do even more. That’s why I plan to keep at this for a long time.”