Community Insights: Cefn Hoile

Cefn Hoile is a researcher and inventor, founding member of the Curiosity Collective, and currently a Ph.D student at the HighWire Doctoral Training Centre. He kindly agreed to be interviewed and here he talks about past and present projects, patents and open source, the Internet of Things and design.

What drew you to technology and what was the first project you ever worked on?

As a kid I had Technic Lego and an Acorn Electron, both of which had invention at their core. I loved conceiving and testing physical mechanisms and creating graphical games, but I was frustrated not to be able to combine the two. I won a George Compurobot from a competition in the Eagle comic, but it had no sensors, so couldn't be programmed in any serious way.

I was excited by the potential of physical computing, but I couldn't overcome these challenges alone and my computing career fizzled out at around 12 years old, to be rekindled only much later in my mid-twenties. I often wonder what would have happened if anyone back then could have taught me the fundamentals of programming, or any kind of electronics, and I think that's what's driving me into education today.

Cutting a long story short a degree in Philosophy led me to Artificial Intelligence and then a Masters in Artificial Life got me into technology research. My first substantial project was playing God - creating an artificial ecosystem of creatures with Newtonian physics and Artificial neurons, which evolved their own bodily structures and dynamic behaviours from nothing. This work went on to be incorporated in "Black Shoals" – a stock market driven planetarium shown at the Tate Gallery in 2001 .

What project are you most proud of?

The BT Rules project was focused on designing programming tools for non-programmers. It brought together some really talented developers and promised great potential. I aimed high on that project, and sometimes thought I'd overextended myself.

When we had the infrastructure in place and actually working, wiring online services, mail and mobile phones together using plain English sentences I could hardly believe it. Sadly as we approached launch date, the departmental budget was halved, everyone on the team left the company, and the project was mothballed, so these days it's just a few Vimeo videos and papers online. Them's the breaks, but it was my proudest hour to deliver on those promises.

As someone who has spent many years working as a researcher and inventor, in your opinion what are the biggest challenges related to innovation that companies will face in the next 5-10 years?

I genuinely think there will be a dam-breaking moment in terms of users' control of their own technology within just a few years. Tools like MIT's Scratch suggest a beginning, where good user-focused design and expressive digital control meet. People are only just beginning to ask "Why isn't everything like that?". There's no fundamental reason why different specialist developers are needed for each tiny nook of my digital lifestyle, or that products or services I've bought have their behaviour baked-in.

Entrepreneurs will conceive and disseminate new tools to enable consumer scripting and the ones which are comprehensible and powerful will become dominant. As with all great futures, it will be unevenly distributed and the companies who don't get it will be fodder, because digital behaviours are so central to the experience of everything these days. The bank which doesn't let me express exactly when and how money can leave my account, the phone which beeps uncontrollably at a funeral with no means of understanding why, the mail system which cannot be richly automated, will be yesterdays news.

Patents, open source or both, and why?

That's a difficult one. From my work as a commercial inventor, I have a lot of patents to my name, and I can see why corporations want to accumulate them given the current state of international law. The question here is what should the law be? How long should a caveman wait after seeing the wheel, or the axe, before copying it? Is twenty years the morally correct amount of time?

It's a bogus question, patents are clearly a matter of policy, not natural right, which is why I reject the term Intellectual Property. The patent law we have today has to be changed to prevent innovation from being suppressed, especially in the software arena. Apologists argue that patents are needed to defend the money needed for development. To satisfy their needs, the law could be changed to require corporations to spend money to develop the innovations claimed by a patent, or else lose it. The investment to develop "one-click" and plenty of other so-called innovations have been exactly zero, which goes against the spirit of the law.

The multi-billion dollar open source software industry grew out of humble beginnings, but could open source hardware ever support an industry of anything like the same scale?

I think the scale of the industry will go well beyond what we would understand as Open Source hardware. As manufacturing becomes democratised, there's very little reason why everything in my house couldn't be a bespoke item, made exactly to my tastes.

Where items need a digital component, I'm sure open approaches will dominate, simply because designers will find it easier to incorporate publicly documented and rights-unencumbered projects, compared to those who hide their light under a bushel (and pages of NDAs). A small number of open projects will attract all the documentation, bug fixes and attention, and will tend to dominate the field. Most open hardware people will not be paid for hardware as such; they will be paid to make sense of hardware for non-hardware people, as integrators, educators, enablers.

With the proliferation of hackerspaces and the growing popularity of platforms such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi, an increasing number of people from a non-technical background are getting into technology and making things. Is this important and if so, why?

I find the distinction is blurring as to what is, and what isn't a technical background. First of all, there are a million different backgrounds, and you can rarely limit the scope of your work to the areas you're trained in. I'm as clueless about radio propagation as others are about software. Making is often about partially-informed muddling through, and I believe that full-time engineers are mostly doing the same thing, but with more experience and hence better heuristics for their professional bodging.

Some people just have the right mindset for working with computers; they have learned from personal encounters that they are deeply stupid and need very clear instructions. As community-builders, we can help people realise that anyone has access to the tools and knowledge needed to give those instructions to computers. If you have the right instincts for the material you're working with, you may be better off than someone with a formal education - that education may have alienated them from their creative instincts.

What future does the Internet of Things have in store for us?

The Internet of Things to my mind has more to do with the programmability of things. Starting with things is fundamental. Things are woven intimately into our lives. However, the connectivity suggested by 'Internet' is a minor, though relevant, aspect of opening up things to user control. An awful lot of meaningful logic in interaction design is standalone and limited to the thing itself, and cracking this would be more significant. If digital devices were more open when shipped, you could retrofit internet connectivity to almost anything. I'm generally a bit sceptical of relying on connectivity for devices to function properly, given how patchy network availability tends to be, both wired and wireless. In practice I feel the revolution of IoT will be through the side effects - designers opening up their devices to being manipulated by someone else's inventive ideas.

Can you tell us about Enigmaker.

It's easy to think of Inventors as people who rely on patents to make a living. Open source businesses are a proof-by-existence that the software industry doesn't need to limit copying or enforce a licensing model to succeed. Enigmaker was a secret identity I adopted during my sabbatical from BT to investigate the same issue for the 'Invention industry' - do inventors really need patents or other Intellectual Monopoly Rights to engage in the business of prototyping and launching new products?

Tacticalendar prototype

I documented the prototyping of one unknown invention a week, unprotected, into the public domain, with updates via Twitter and the Enigmaker.org blog as the work progressed. The gimmick was to invite guesses as to what the invention was. At the end of each week I'd reveal the invention, and summarise all the guesses. I had a lot of fun, but the jury's still out, as only one of the inventions, the Tacticalendar, was finally launched as a product to no acclaim. I'll get back to down-streaming some more of these, one day. A lot of the guesses were better than the things I actually built, just as I suspected, and I saved on the lawyers and IPO fees for six unprofitable inventions, so I count that as a win. I left project#5 hanging, still inviting guesses until Enigmaker rises again.

What was the most fun project you've worked on as part of the Curiosity Collective?

Actually, the most fun is a project I didn't even work on! We put on a show of interactive installations which were embodiments of English proverbs. The specification of "A Watched Pot Never Boils" ran out of control and gobbled up the entire budget for the show, and then some. In some groups this could be seen as a problem, but with the Curiosity Collective their efforts were applauded as everyone could see how beautifully twisted it all was.

The principle was to create a kettle which would boil when you weren't looking at it. The team had to pull apart a brand-new, shiny electric kettle, and create a plume of steam which was cool to the touch, (for safety) but still had gave the illusion of rising (in early prototypes the steam fell out of the kettle like dry ice). They solved this with an elaborate mechanism combining an electrostatic mister and fan, and proceeded to write an algorithm using multiple cameras to gaze track everyone in the gallery to check whether the pot was watched or not, and control its boiling. The upshot was an artwork which you could only really appreciate out of the corner of your eye, as actually looking at it caused it to stop functioning altogether. Inspired. My contribution for that show was a cat-murdering machine, rewarding those who were curious enough to turn the handle. You can guess the proverb.

What are you working on at the moment?

At Shrimping It I'm standardising a design for a £1.40 breadboard and stripboard circuit which is pin and binary-compatible with the Arduino Uno, a very popular hobby microcontroller board for robotics and automation projects. I hope this will give kids and underprivileged adults a route to accessing the Maker scene.

It's already attracting a lot of interest from UK educators, recently tasked with streaming serious computer science into the curriculum. It's essentially a pragmatic project. A classroom full of official Arduino boards has to be gathered in at the end of the day for cost reasons alone. I hope the #Shrimp design means that kids can take their own programmable projects home. With buying consortia distributing them at cost, the kids might even choose to buy a couple more with pocket money. Following this route means they already have the breadboard and soldering experience needed and a bill of materials allowing them to deploy their own circuits in the field, or more likely the bedroom - sibling alarms are a popular application!

What is the most important thing you have learned in your career to date?

I've learned the hard way the overwhelming importance of the human dimension versus the technical dimension in the success of projects. As an engineer it's a great temptation for me to focus on the implementation, seeking elegance, efficiency and defensibility amongst my peers, while investing less effort on the softer aspects. I think the tendencies of our education system, to separate hard science into a clean room isolated from other subjects, reinforces this problem.

These days I try to prioritise design and communication; to understand the impact of what I'm sharing from others' point of view. Reflecting empathetically, in a committed way, or better still, engaging stakeholders in the design directly, will make you reconsider your implementation decisions. That's just as true whether that's an art installation or a new online service.

Thank you for your time, Cefn!