We were moving our desks and things around the office yesterday, and I realized that every piece of office decoration corresponded to a document on my hard drive - I could recycle all my tattered posters and papercraft and simply reprint them upstairs. It struck me that this was the real, today version of what C. Sven writes about - physical objects like desks and catamarans reduced to files describing their structure, to be printed and destroyed and reconstructed at convenience. It also felt like a Bruce Sterling moment, so I thought I'd pay tribute to his awesome speeches by recording my feelings in the style of a ranty Bruce Sterling speech:
(if you haven't heard any of Mr. Sterling's speeches, this year's SxSW speech is a good place to start: State of the World 2006
the daniel commented, on December 5, 2007 at 6:23 a.m.:
Thanks for commenting, Rob - I'm definitely talking about the latter. With something like a workspace, you could limit the materials to those easier for a constructor to deal with and not have to do it on a nano-scale, but that seems to be the end goal of this sort of thing.
csven commented, on December 5, 2007 at 6:23 a.m.:
Nicely done. I got a good laugh out of that impression. And what was better was Sterling's comment ("Yes, soon many OTHER aspects of this theory will also begin to dawn on him"). Typical. Only I wonder if that Science Fiction guy has figured out kirkyans yet? Maybe it'll dawn on him some day and he'll write a book around the idea.
In the event you've not seen me mention it elsewhere, the basic spime concept has been around for about ten years afaik; going back to the guys who helped start up Aironet (originally a division of Telxon, the now-swallowed barcode/scanner/data collection company) and for whom I did some product design consulting in the mid-90's. Bruce gets the credit for giving it a name and more clearly defining it, but in my mind those guys - some really smart people - deserve the real credit. I've only recently coined "kirkyan" but I suspect that idea has also been around for some time (here's a link to a now-removed Wikipedia page that explains it - http://www.rebang.com/csven/Kirkyan.htm ). In a nutshell, imagine that the calender on your old wall realized that in a bigger office it would be too small, and auto-resized itself. It would know which size because there is a virtual version of it in a virtual home somewhere and that version has shared this experience with the real thing. Something along those lines.
the daniel commented, on December 5, 2007 at 6:23 a.m.:
Csven: You know, I've read your descriptions of the kirkyan in passing on your blog, but I haven't really "gotten it" until now - the oil spill drones are a great example.
Rob commented, on December 5, 2007 at 6:23 a.m.:
Are you talking virtualization, simulating tangibility via, say, projections which aren't really anywhere? Or just ultra-fast assembly/disassembly via nanotech, keeping the phisicality of the objects?
The first seems way easier, although the cubicle itself might have to go. The keyboard and workspace could all still be reproduced, even if you trade in your standard pencils for some sensor-filled versions.
Of course there's always stuff like this to look out for, though.