The Magic of Community Experience

Does technology have to be highly advanced in order to feel like magic?

An example of a very simple technology that produced a very powerful 'magical' experience came to mind last week while I was participating in a podcast at the Mesh 2007 conference. Jeff Parks arranged the podcast and invited a number of experts to talk about User Experience and Community.

The user interface I'm referring to was very simple - a paint stir stick. The experience was an exhilarating connection to community.

Let me explain. It was at the grand finale video screening of the 1991 Siggraph conference. A number of us from the Corel engineering team had been flown down to Las Vegas as a reward for busting our butts on another release of CorelDraw. We were excited about seeing the latest hot-damn computer graphics coming out of Hollywood so we got to the mega-theatre good and early.

The weather was dangerously hot that day - over 40 flippin' degrees Celsius. My friends and I waited for an eternity in the heat outside the convention center, dreading the arrival of each wave of buses bringing new competition for the best seats, the exhaust from the engines pushing the heat up to oven temperatures.

Finally the wall of doors burst open and we poured through like streams of desert sand. It took a moment to adjust to the relative darkness of the theatre. I blinked repeatedly, trying to understand what I was seeing. Hundreds of people were racing to their seats. Hundreds more had already claimed their spots and were waving paint stir sticks in the air. Stir sticks? Yes, they were painted red on one side and green on the other.

Who are these people? I wondered. Where did they get these sticks? Who told them to wave them around? In no time at all thousands of stir sticks had sprouted into the air like blades of red and green grass blowing in a fierce, interior wind. On my chair I found mine.

And then I noticed the gigantic video screen before me. Ordinarily it would be hard to miss a screen that was the size of an apartment building but such was the intensity of the stick waving frenzy that it required a moment to sink in.

And it was ablaze with tiny red and green dots. Could there be a connection? Well of course there was, but I wasn't sure what was going on until Loren Carpenter* of Lucasfilm appeared at the podium to spell it out for us.

Loren Carpenter had created the world's biggest game of Pong. We were the first players. He explained that the 2500 people on the left side of the room would be playing against the 2500 people on the right side. Holding our sticks up in the air we could turn them to present the green or the red side towards the cameras that were mounted behind each mass of players.

And then the pong game appeared on the gigantic screen and on each side floated a massive rectangular paddle of light. The cameras, Carpenter explained, would measure the hue of the crowd. Red would make the paddle go up and green would make it go down. Wow!

And so we played. We played colossal collective pong with remarkable ease. Somehow, as individuals we gauged what was required from us - a little more green, no, a little more red, quickly, now green again. We'd hit the ball and send it to the folks on the other side of the room and they would pop it back to us with equal ease and excitement. How was this even possible?

It was possible because we formed a collective intelligence through this simple but ingenious social media tool. The decisions were binary - up or down - but they were sufficient to support tangible collaboration with immediately visible results.

I have been obsessed with communications technology since I was a child but this caused me to marvel at its potential in a whole new way. Imagine if we could harness this to do other productive things in everyday life. Social Intelligence.

It was a profound experience of community - made possible through an extraordinarily simple user interface. It's the same principle of organization we see in trees where each collection of individual leaves forms an image of a complete and vital whole. It was, for me, pure magic.

I spoke about this experience at our group podcast discussion last week because it is precisely the same phenomenon that we can see happening with Social Media today. Perhaps we don't use the word 'magic' when we are talking about these kinds of technological applications experiences, but I do believe that there is an underlying sense of wonder about it all. Where is it leading us? What are the limits of collective human intelligence when harnessed as such by social media tools?

We are all wondering this.

Footnotes

* Loren Carpenter is a brilliant innovator from LucasFilm and co-inventor of commercially viable fractals (as distinct from the pure mathematical science of Benoit Mandelbrot, their inventor.) In the early 1980's Carpenter and Alain Fournier of the University of Toronto separately discovered a means to produce fractals that was significantly cheaper than the methods used in the research labs. This changed the world of computer graphics by laying the foundation for the naturalistic, textured realism that we see in contemporary commercial computer graphic entertainment. The first big appearance of 'practical fractals' was the 'Genesis' scene from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. (back to story)