Andrew Miller

It’s been a full year since I moved back to Atlanta to join Georgia Tech’s Human-Centered Computing PhD program—and consequently moved away from my job as a user experience designer. Over that time, I’ve had a number of interesting conversations with friends, former colleagues, and other HCC students, all curious to know what I (or in the case of other HCC students what “we”) actually do.  Usually I try to head this discussion off with a glib response. I usually start off with ”I do research.” If my interlocutor is persistent enough to ask what I actually study, I say “I study the future.”

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You’ve probably noticed the ‘lifestream’ section on this site. (If not, have a look and come back when you’re done. I’ll still be here.) It’s mainly an attempt to inject some fresh content into my otherwise extremely static website – a mishmash of twitter updates, recommended blog entries, and photos I’ve taken. But it’s also a conscious effort to project a personal/professional identity in a way that a ‘hobbies’ page (or any other GeoCities anachronism) just couldn’t. The idea is that at any given time, the snapshot of my thoughts/music tastes/etc. will provide a representative sampling of ‘me’ – or at least what it would be like to be Facebook friends with me. All of this is made possible, of course, by the increasing amount of social data we generate and consume online. If you’re like me (in this small regard at least), you’ve been gradually accumulating a collection of online activities that generate their own RSS feeds, all pumping out this information to nobody in particular.  We’re fast approaching an inflection point – if any given activity, online or otherwise, can painlessly be converted into a ’stream’ and broadcast to anyone who cares to subscribe, it falls to us to decide what gets broadcast and to whom.

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MMS! Tethering! Copy and paste! Copy and paste! Copy and paste! If you read gadget blogs, this is what you heard in the run-up to Apple’s iPhone 3.0 announcement this week.  And indeed, the iPhone took several small but important steps towards its ultimate destiny as the Tricorder (or really the PADD) of our time.  But as Matt Jones (of Dopplr.com) observed, the real shocker was the announcement of full support for third-party peripherals. [Read more →]

Evernote is a service that lets people take notes, clip webpages, and make lists.  In this respect, it is quite an ordinary service, and it joins the legion of student design projects and lukewarm startups trying to help people “get things done.” But its true worth is as a study of the future of software: multi-platform, mobile, and constantly updated.

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I have never been a particularly assiduous or insightful blogger. I blogged a bit when I studied abroad, mainly as an alternative to group e-mails, and I had a blog a few years ago where I posted links and items of interest.  Since that time, a host of ways for me to share tidbits has supplanted those efforts: twitter for status updates, flickr for photos, Google Reader for shared links, last.fm for music… It’s even got to the point where I now use a status aggregator (SocialThing) to publish and keep track of my friends’ activities across all these services. I’ve also gotten an iPhone, which lets me consume and produce these social data with a volume and voracity that would certainly shock previous generations, and indeed many of the less hyper-connected in my own. [Read more →]