Date: Sat, 04 Oct 1997 17:57:24 -0400
From: Brygg Ullmer
To: tangible@media.mit.edu, ti97@media.mit.edu, ti96@media.mit.edu
Subject: "Clades and Clones" meet Tangible Interfaces
Hello, all!
A piece of text I read this spring has been coming to mind often with
respect to tangible interfaces. I've mentioned it to a few of you, and
just for kicks I've typed in three paragraphs of excerpt.
The passage is from a great book by Freeman Dyson (noted
physicist/futurist, peer of Feynman, etc.) called "Disturbing the
Universe." The chapter about "clades and clones" has strong analogues
for the field of human-computer interface, I think. In the next
chapter, Dyson goes on about the "Green and Gray," which also has nice
relevancies (PC-beige is awefully close to gray, and wood has a sweet
flavor of "green"), but that's for another day.
The text introduces the terms from the biological context, then applies
these to the question of human language -- e.g., the growing
pervasiveness of English. The text says "A linguistic clone is a
monoglot culture, a population with a single language sheltered from
alien words and alien thoughts.... As the centuries go by, words become
fewer and masterpieces of literature become rarer."
While people may differ on the English literature claim, I think it's
interesting to consider the notion of HCI as keyboard+monitor+pointer,
or typewriter+television+"mouse" as Maggie put it, as "clone" and
perhaps evolutionary dead-end. I believe that the tangible interfaces
stream of work represents a really interesting cross-fertilized "clade."
Playing with Dyson's argument, perhaps our work has the potential for
rejuvenating and producing a flurry of early great works in the
sometimes sluggish world of HCI/CHI. Here's hoping!
--Brygg
Freeman Dyson, "Disturbing the Universe" (1979)
Points Beyond: Clades and Clones (Ch 20, p223, Basic Books paperback )
In biology, a clone is the opposite of a clade. A clade is a group of
populations sharing a common origin but exhibiting genetic diversity so
wide that they are barred from interbreeding. A clone is a single
population in which all individuals are genetically identical. Clades
are the stuff of which great leaps forward in evolution are made.
Clones are evolutionary dead ends, slow to adapt and slow to evolve.
Clades can occur only in organisms that reproduce sexually. Clones in
nature are typically asexual.
All this, too, has its analog in the domain of linguistics. A
linguistic clone is a monoglot culture, a population with a single
language sheltered from alien words and alien thoughts. Its linguistic
inheritance, propagated asexually from generation to generation, tends
to become gradually impoverished. The process of impoverishment is easy
to see in the declining vocabulary of English from Shakespeare to
Dickens, not to speak of Faulkner and Hemingway. As centuries go by,
words become fewer and masterpieces of literature become rarer.
Linguistic rejuvenation requires the analog of sexual reproduction, the
mixture of languages and cross-fertilization of vocabularies. The great
flowering of English culture followed the sexual union of French with
Anglo-Saxon in Norman England. The clade of Romance languages did not
spring from Latin alone but from the cross-fertilization of Latin with
the languages of the local barbarian tribes as the empire disintegrated.
In human culture as in biology, a clone is a dead end, a clade is a
promise of immortality.
Are we to be a clade or a clone? This is perhaps the central problem in
humanity's future. In other words, how are we to make our social
institutions flexible enough to preseve our precious biological and
cultural diversity? ....