John Seely Brown is the former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He now works as an author and consultant and is a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California. He enjoys researching and speaking on such issues as radical innovation, digital culture, ubiquitous computing and organizational and individual learning. John Seely Brown contributes to receiver's "at home" issue with a text on how ubiquitous computing is entering the "home zone", the connectivity as a matter of course era, and how crucial it is to keep things simple in order to cope with the wealth of information engulfing us. People look for simple, intuitional, participatory ways to engage with technology as their private life becomes the center of the connected world.

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Artwork for this article by Christina Farrell & Kim Sevilleja

Everything seemed insubstantial. The only solid evidence he had was a lump the size of a dodo's egg with a pain that bourbon couldn't kill. He had enough information to sail a ship on, but no clues to navigate by. Only a raft of words taking him nowhere, very, very slowly. They offered to tell him everything, but so did the dictionary. The victim was more eloquent. And those crumpled sheets on the bed spoke volumes that the flat white sheets of paper could never match. On those there were only words, words, words.

I guess you did not think that this text was embarking on a detective story. But why? No doubt the pastiche is not very good, but there is enough bad detective fiction around to cover the blushes. So why would no one expect that reading on would reveal "who did it"?

To find that out, we need to shift the question from "who did it?" to "what did it?" What made it clear, before all the pastiche we could muster, that this was never going to be a detective story? The simple answer is the site you are looking at itself. Innumerable things about it tell you well before you read a word that what you are looking at is not going to contain a detective novel. Layout, headers, typography and a tumult of other features implicitly insist that this is not the place for a whodunit.

Well-designed media provide peripheral clues that subtly direct users along particular interpretive paths by invoking social and cultural understandings. Context and content work efficiently together as an ensemble, sharing the burden of communication. If the relationship between the two is honored, their interaction can make potentially complex practices of communication, interpretation, and response much easier. This is the essence of keeping things simple.

Taking account of context involves more, however, than a well-integrated interface. It also requires taking account of the continually evolving social conventions carried by context. There are two reasons why it is important to look at the interactions between content and context - or between other related divisions, such as center and periphery, content and form, message and medium, or information and noise.

First, the greatest challenge designers and users face is achieving clarity and simplicity. Yet we often overlook ways in which peripheral resources can help clarify and simplify. Second, the truly revolutionary impact of the information revolution will be not in the new ways that technology can separate message from medium by making everything digital, but rather in the continually new ways it finds to creatively recombine message and medium. Software design, in particular, ambiguously straddles divisions of form and content. If we are to go beyond designs that remain heavily dependent on older technologies and forms, we need to develop a fine sense of the redistribution of resources made possible by software technologies.

Clues provided by context

Consider, for instance, something as simple as a telephone-answering machine. Its use is not quite self-explanatory. A moment's thought reveals that the common message "I'm not here now" is, in the abstract, nonsense.

Whomever "I" refers to should be "here", wherever here is, "now", whenever the phrase is uttered. Yet in practice, despite its formal incoherence, the phrase turns out to be much more efficient than attempts at formal coherence, such as "If you're hearing this message, then I will not be at home at the time at which you will be calling."

What gives the more pithy phrase its effectiveness? Clearly, the words alone do not clinch the matter. To be understood, they rely on peripheral clues for interpretation. Background clicks and whirs, hisses from the tape, and the recorded quality of the voice itself all help callers realize that they are hearing a recorded message, and thus prepare them for a message's particular - if in the abstract peculiar - logic. These peripheral resources are not usually regarded as part of the information with which information technology is concerned. Yet, appearing unproblematically in the hiss of a recorded message, peripheral contributions can nevertheless be quite informative, allowing someone leaving a message and someone hearing it to communicate with a simple efficiency.

Important though they may be for design, these peripheral resources are not necessarily designed themselves. More usually, they evolve, as people - often quite unreflectively - enlist the support of contingent properties of a technology to keep things simple.

In attempting to rid communication of peripheral resources, such accounts evoke the old game in which children challenge one another to describe something awkward like a spiral staircase without using their hands. As a game, this challenge is amusing, but, in practice, if you actually have to show someone what a spiral staircase is, it is almost always much more efficient to use your hands - particularly if you can point to an example. The material world is rich with explanatory resources, in part because most of our explanations involve the material world. Abandoning it, therefore, is not only a difficult task, but one unlikely to make things simpler.

A new common sense model

For some years now, the new information generated in one year is more than a thousand times larger than the size of the entire print collection in the Library of Congress. It is hard to grasp the consequences of this much new information being generated each year, year after year. But people have invented their own strategies to navigate through this immense sea of information. The members of the networked generation look out to find what they need, then decide what they want to trust and finally create whatever they want with it. This is a generation used to crossing boundaries, holding multiple conversations in mind simultaneously and engaging in a hypertext style of linking and thinking - and context is the variable it is orientated towards. People are willing to engage with multiple viewpoints before synthesizing their own, and the platforms they use for doing so are mostly digital: social networking technologies keep people in constant contact with their own intimate community. Blogging lets them experiment with exposing ideas to others and getting their feedback nearly instantly. By participating in the rapidly expanding worlds of open source, open content and remix, people build on the work of others. Rich media helps them to express complex ideas and to find ways to combine emotion with content. And, finally, the vast network that comprises our cyber-infrastructure lets people access remote data all over the world - right from their living room.

To exploit the opportunities created by the complexity of a connected world, people are looking for technologies that help them to come together and innovate in response to things unanticipated. We strive to expand the choices available while at the same time looking for help in finding the resources that are most relevant to us. Communication technologies have become our central tools to socialize, exchange, build knowledge, they have become part of our private and domestic lives.

Over the past decade, we witnessed a huge transformation of the media landscape that is related to these phenomena. On the one hand, mass media is becoming more concentrated in terms of ownership as audiences and revenue sources slowly decline. On the other hand, we see a blossoming of niche content, and we see a migration from text based content to music and video in terms of using the internet as a platform for access and distribution. At the same time more powerful, compact and mobile access devices are making it easier to find and connect with relevant content.

The same is true for media production. At the most basic level, young people are increasingly customizing media to better suit their individual needs. Rather than relying on music companies to pre-determine the mix of songs on a CD, they are downloading individual tracks and assembling their own tailored sequence of songs. "Podcasters" share customized selections of music with friends and broader audiences. A vibrant remix culture has emerged.

I believe that these transitions are part of a move to a new common sense model that shapes how we view ourselves and the world around us, how we organize ourselves and relevant resources and how we strive to improve ourselves. Life in the digital age is all about creating, tinkering, learning and sharing. To enable them to do all that, people look for simple, intuitional, participatory ways to engage with technology - and let their private life become the center of the connected world.

This text was written for receiver. It includes parts of a joint paper by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid: "Keeping it Simple: Investigating Resources in the Periphery". Printed in receiver by arrangement with John Seely Brown.