Empowering People Rather Than Connecting Them - Human-Computer Interaction and Innovation in Handheld, Mobile and Wearable Technologies - page 270

spread out over time, and which may be difficult
to classify consistently. This perspective changes
the design of feedback for users, the software
engineering platforms devices are developed on,
and has implications for the users' models of how
to engage with their mobile devices.
It also changes the notion of the sort of services
users can be offered. One can imagine 'Apps stores'
offering customers new sensory perception abili-
ties (e.g. a 'mother-in-law early warning system'
which provides feedback when the mother-in-law
is within four minutes of your current location, or a
'my friends are in the pub' sensory input, which is
activated when more than two of your close social
network contacts are co-located in a pub), which
could then be combined with actuation modules
which generated particular behaviours, such as
changing your visibility status, when initiated.
Frameworks which make it easy for end users to
combine multiple sensor readings, and possibly
integrating them with other information from the
Internet, allows the creation of 'virtual sensors'
which offer a new service. These can then be
shared with other users, many of whom will have
little technical skill or interest, but who can profit
from the work of others.
This approach can be summed up as empower
the users—don't dictate ! Give users more options,
and create opportunities to build control loops
combining different groups of output and input
channels. Let the users create meaningful interac-
tions, and let groups of users put information and
structure into the world, creating the conditions for
their future interactions. As discussed at length in
(Clark 2008), humans are the ultimate examples
of beings which are suited to create and adapt
to new ecological niches. There are also some
interesting objective measures of empowerment
as the maximum information flow the agent can
direct into its future sensoric input via the envi-
ronment. It is a measure of control suggested by
(Klyubin, Polani & Nehaniv 2006), building on
work of Powers (1973), and is the information-
theoretic capacity of an agent's actuation channel.

As Klyubin et al say, an agent which maximises
empowerment, is continuously striving for more
options, which lead to more potential for control
or influence as if to the motto “All else being
equal—keep your options open”.
Once people's behaviour starts to be shaped by
the properties of these novel sensory-action loops
we can expect to see interesting novel, but hard
to predict developments in the way people move
and behave in our cities. In this issue, Pirhonen
and Sillence note the effect of the mobile phone
use on the behaviour of young Finnish boys. The
flexibility provided by the mobile phone allowed
them to defer decisions on what to do next, and led
to less frequent games of ice hockey. Once people
add extra sensory perceptions to their mobile
devices which are a function of their behaviour,
location and proximity to others in their social
network, we will see interesting and unpredictable
new developments in such situations. Maybe it
becomes enough for three boys to start heading
towards the ice hockey for others to be alerted to
this and join them?
We will see an increasing level of conscious
and unconscious offloading of information into
the environment, which might be for our own use,
or for others'. This is stigmergy —indirect com-
munication between agents via the environment
(which in our case includes the digital environ-
ment) without targeting a specific recipient. The
academic work in this field is used to explain
nest building and foraging in social insects, but
it is also a vital step in the creation of cultural
instruments such as language. Maybe the three
boys had not actually originally intended to play
another game of ice hockey, but as they formed a
core of a potential game, others might be attracted
to that area, and a game would emerge in a self-
organised manner.
We might see a more general move in interac-
tion design away from our simplistic 'command-
and-control' systems towards a metaphor which
is more like dancing, with a natural ebb and flow
of control between the user, their mobile device