bjbj|:|: So I'm gonna talk for precisely ten minutes and the countdown's started, so awesome
about being alone. So two things to say about that. The first thing is that it might seem
like a bit of a strange topic for me to talk about in front of a room of hundreds of my
peers. And the second thing is that it's okay if you don't like it, because it will be over
really quickly. So let's start with a quote from, I think, America's most famous seeker
of solitude, and this is from J.D. Salinger from an interview he gave with the New York
Times in 1980: "There is a marvelous peace in not publishing." And he spent a large amount
of his life deliberately not publishing. But the problem is, now we're all publishers,
as Michael was talking about so eloquently earlier. We all publish, over multiple channels,
and we publish all kinds of different things, more and more personal things about our lives.
That has an effect on our culture, and that's much discussed. But the flip side of that
is that we also have to consume all of this stuff too. All of this stuff that's kind of
like being pushed out and being published, we all have to consume. And I think that has
tremendous effects on our internal worlds, on our internal psyche. And I think the ability
to look away from this and to stop and disconnect is vitally important for us as human beings.
As designers, we also seem to be really, really comfortable with adding the network to everything
we do. Everything we do, more often than not, we're asked to consider how it connects to
something else, whether that's the Web, whether that's another device. This is a typewriter
that someone's hacked so that it can tweet. [Audience laughter] So let's look back into
history for some lessons about why being alone why solitude is so important for us as humans.
First thing, regardless of how you feel about the historical accuracy of these various stories,
there is a shared cultural history of being alone. Christ's 40 days alone in the wilderness;
the Buddha's I think 47 days underneath the Bodhi tree, so he wins in the kind of religious
figure solitude race. And then on the right, we have Muhammad, who would visit a cave and
sit alone and meditate until he received visions from the angel Gabriel. But there's a slightly
more secular story that's also interesting for us to consider. So this is Michel de Montaigne,
who lived in the 16th century in France, who was a became is known now for being an essayist.
But how he got to being an essayist is the interesting story. So he formed a very, very
close and intimate relationship with another humanist judge, called tienne de La Bo tie,
and the two of them would communicate with each other constantly. They found a soul mate
in each other, and they would communicate and communicate and communicate. They would
write; they would share their observations on the world. Unfortunately, one day tienne
de La Bo tie died, and de Montaigne was grief-stricken. How he dealt with this was, he had a being
landed gentry, he had a big chateau. He retreated to his very well-stocked library and announces
to the world this very, very flowery statement, within which is contained this line that I
really like: "retired to the bosom of the learned virgins." And he spent around ten
years in his library, and he started to write. In the absence of his friend, he started to
write about the world around him. He started to write about everything, from society to
France at the time. But what actually he created was his essay, and that's what he's known
for now. He basically invented short-form writing by shutting himself away from the
world. So I think the point that I wanna make there is that we might think of being alone
and disconnecting as an abdication of activity, as something that pushes back the world and
is a silent place. But I think what I'm trying to say is that solitude is in fact generative.
It can be a place in which we find creative energy. And so that's why it's so important
to design so that people can access that space. And a modern essayist is getting in on the
act as well. This is Alain de Botton and he says, "We have become such experts at being
always in touch, informed, connected, now must relearn how to be silent, disconnected,
alone." The curious syntax of that statement may give you a clue as to the channel over
which he published it: this is his Twitter feed. There it is. I favorited it. I'm sure
the irony wasn't lost on him, or perhaps it was, but he runs the University of Life in
London, so what do I know? If you prefer something a little bit baser, there's too much stuff
we live in a stuffalanche, which is this rather great columnist who writes for a British newspaper
called The Guardian, Charlie Brooker both kind of expressing the same sentiment. So
let's look at a few well, this is like a solitude in the modern world, basically. A friend of
mine, Sarah Pennington, performed a piece of research for this pan-European research
project called the Equator Project, which was to basically look at the effects of what
we in the old country call information/communication technology on our lives. And so what Sarah
did is she logged every interaction she had with a piece of technology. Most of it's a
phone, you can see the TV, whether she played PlayStation. And she found out that, over
the course of a week, she spent a total of 25.47 hours interacting with some form of
communications technology, which is a shocking discovery, or at least it's interesting. That
was in 2002. Why that's interesting is 'cause that's before we started having all of these
many channels to publish over, so that's before Twitter, Flickr, Facebook became popular.
So I wonder what would happen if Sarah did the same research now, how much more of her
time would be taken up. And the network that enables all of this communication keeps growing.
That might be a matter for some conjecture. That network map, you may not believe it,
but it does keep getting more blue. And there are things like the network permeates interspaces,
which we never had it before, so onboard Wi-Fi and wireless access points in the middle of
the Yukon. That green dot up there, I believe it's a place called Betty's Chicken Shack
that has free publicly available Wi-Fi. So I guess the question is, if we accept that
solitude is a valuable state for us to enter into, how do we design for it? This is a Robinson
Crusoe Lego figure. How do we recreate Montaigne's library? This may be a bit extreme. It takes
a while before people realize what's wrong with this image. Basically, the call answer
buttons and the soft keys have been removed, and this is an artifact that Sarah created
for her research. But there are, like, elements of that in a product that I actually worked
on. This very, very weird thing is a collaboration between Bang & Olufsen and Samsung. It was
called the Serenata. It was a miserable failure. But it had this feature, and the deal was
that it was a music phone. It had this feature called Pure Music mode, and what happened
is, when you slipped the speaker up, the phone would background any communications activity
and just focus on playing music, so you could put it on the sideboard of your expensive
Scandinavian log cabin and, like, hear the beautiful music from the actually quite nice
speaker. When you exit Pure Music mode, you would get a log of all of the communication
activity that had happened whilst you were listening to music. So it wouldn't answer
the phone. The phone would ring. You wouldn't get alerted to any incoming text messages
until you actually made the decision to, like, reengage with the world. Now, I know the idea
of a phone that shuts off its communications capabilities simply by a physical action maybe
the way you hold it. [Audience laughter] Oh, right, yeah. Anyway, so there's also things
like OmmWriter, and I don't know how many of you have used OmmWriter. It's a fantastic
piece of software that does the same thing: backgrounds all of the kind of activity and
all the stuff that's coming into your laptop, and it just lets you focus on the craft of
writing. And there's also some inspiration to take from the way that people reestablish
boundaries outside in the real world, so it's a quiet car on an Amtrak train, or another
train operator chain. How those rules are expressed and how they are respected by the
community, because there's something about stepping back and disconnecting has to be
so it's like it has to be a two-way thing. So you have to have some kind of permission
from the community to disengage from it, so that people don't kind of like worry when
you suddenly disappear. And that's something to think about. Cornish, New Hampshire, was
where Salinger lived, and those community rules were expected and enforced there. So
people would come to Cornish looking for Salinger, and depending on how aggressive they were
in their questioning, they would get sent on a wild-goose chase. So the more kind of
annoying they were, the further they got sent. Someone once taught me once that I should
always end every talk with a quote from Charles Bukowski. I don't think that was my mother,
but anyway, so I'm gonna do that. And Bukowski has something to say on the subject, because
he normally has something to say on every subject: "Without stopping entirely and doing
nothing at all for great periods, you're going to lose everything." So let's think about
how do we help people to disconnect, to stop. Thanks. [End of Audio] UX Week 2010 Ben Fullerton
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