with tremendous synchronicity, from IBM’s “New Paradigms in Using Computers” event.
» Dan Gillmor’s eJournal: User Interface, User Experience—Where’s It Going?
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Found this while wandering around the examples of using Amazon’s webservices APIs: graphical representation of relationships between items built on the fly from amazon’s familiar collaborative filtering, sales patterns and linkages data.
Loads of potential yet to realise here, but still inspires a “whoooo…”
Filed under: Interface innovations
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You have to love it.
Got turned onto NetNewsWire by Coates and Webb (sounds like a firm that manufactures fine walking sticks for country squires). I’m now feeling positively pained by going to a webpage and having to decipher their design, grok the semiotics – instead of slidiing smoothly through RSS feeds of writing, info, and other good, good stuff…
One very natty thing NetNewsWire does is let you import and export your subscription lists to effect blogrolling on steroids. Moreover, it seems to ‘merge’ the subscriptions of others with your own. So you then in turn might maybe export your subscriptions list, to be merged, mutated and passed on…
Fabulous.
So, FWIW here is:
NetNewsWire is a another glimpse of the pageless, siteless, webflux of the near future. These glimpses are becoming more and more frequent. Recent, other timeslips into this possible future worldline of the WWW include AmazonLite and Paul Ford’s essay on Google and the Semantic Web.
So – these nodal points bring me back to an old favourite: whither web design as we know it?
Brother Jakob has been preachin’ this one for a while. We tried to look at it at the BOF session at O’Reilly ETCON, and only really scratched the very wide surface. Victor, Alex, Eric and Michael have been examining it to name but a few. I’ve been doing a lot of stuff at work which is about designing social networks and their topologies, and peterme seems similarly preoccupied.
I think those who have extended themselves from working on sites and pages into information architecture or the wider field of practice described as experience design will be in good shape to tackle this. I hope more do over time, and start experiementing and thinking in this new paradigm.
Ironically, Flash designers maybe adept at handling these ideas too, as they have been working without the page/site metaphor; and new generations of the app are linking into the important structural advantages of the web.
One last link – a great presentation by Doc Searls (apart from some appearances by dodgy looking characters with pieces of chalk), which urges businessmen and technologists to look at the ‘layers’ of civilisation and where they can work together within them. Lou has been thinking along these lines with his notions ‘Enterprise IA’, but with more reference to how organisations rather than civilisations behave.
Where can designers work to link fashion, commerce and richness of the deeper layers of infrastructure these technologies expose?
UPDATE: 12:49am
Dan Gillmor is on it…
Filed under: Interface innovations
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Got very annoyed at the Design Council the other night. They were pitching their series of talks on ‘Humanising Technology”. Strikes me as a very odd phrase: ‘humanise technology’...
To separate and demonise ‘technology’ seems false. It’s what makes us human. It’s our evolutionary distinctiveness.
And anyway what’s so bad about technologising humans?
Would the cro-magnon Design Council be complaining about the distinctly un-apelike flint axes that the crazy stonehacker kids were coming up with, and staging talks on ‘simianising technology’???
I’m reminded of both Maeda’s desire to explore honestly the ‘materiality’ of the digital in design, and once again, Neal Stephenson’s excellent ‘In the beginning was the command-line’ – where the he casts the ‘humanisation’ of technology via graphical user interfaces as the creation of a schizm between the technologically-adept and conversent Morlock elite and a growing group of Eloi in thrall to the GUI, living in a dreamworld they have no control or agency within over that allowed by their unseen and incomprehensible Morlock captors.
What’s the middle ground? Can we make technology, and computers easy to use while maintaining the transparancy, freedom and agency of command-line culture?
Filed under: Design industry and people
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From Dan Gillmor’s live coverage of Larry Lessig’s keynote at O’Reilly OSCON:
‘”Never has there been more control” of creativity, Lessig says. “Never in our history have fewer people controlled more of the future of our culture, ever,” he says.Worried yet?’
» Silicon Valley | 07/24/2002 | Open Source Conference 2002
Filed under: Society and culture
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Simon sends game design theory and game theory links a-plenty. Simon is v.smart (he beat us at the Idler/NTK videogames pub-quiz last week, after all… if only I hadn’t confused Sinistar with Gravitar! I’m such a lam3r! Curses!), but he’s apparently allergic to blogs… so many thanks to him for permission to blog this excellent link-base alpha, and to Celia for prodding him.
Over to Simon:
“Subject: game design and game theory... both related but very different.
Game Theory is more about psychology : things like the Coventry Problem – do we let the Germans drop bombs on Coventry even though it will kill
thousands but may save hundred of thousands in the future because they
still won’t know that we’ve broken Enigma?, Prisoners Dilemma – if you
all keep quiet then we’ll let you go but (or only keep you for
$small_time) but if one of you speaks up he’ll go free and the rest of
you will be killed, and the Hawks and Hares – any system with Hawks
(consumers) and Hares (producers) will necessarily return to
equilibrium.Good books for that are :
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Vintage) by Robert Wright
Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict by Roger B. Myerson
Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction by Morton D. Davis
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga
Game Theory and the Social Contract – Vol. 1 by K. G. Binmore
A Course in Game Theory by Martin J. Osborne and Ariel Rubinstein
The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrodand I think
Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois
is supposed to be good.It’s a very broad subject and those books cover a big swathe. Most of
what I know is mostly about tactics and not about games (weirdly
enough) so I can’t vouch for everything. I always found ‘Il Principe’
and ‘the Art of War’ to be quite good things to read along with Game Theory books.As for Game Design – as in ‘I want to sit down and plan out a
game which I well sell to unwashed people with poor social skills
and too many consoles’ – there aren’t that many good books since it
tends to be more of a black art. The best suggestion is to read as much
as possible about the games industry and play a shed load of games. May
be hang around arcades and just people watch.Game Design: Secret of the Sages by Marc Saltzman – gets mixed reviews. Some people swear by it and it doesn’t contain any
code so it’s nice an non scary.Game Design: The Art & Business of Creating Games by Bob Bates – is good on how a game gets made.
Game Design: Theory and Practice by Richard Rouse – gets reccomended by Amazon. Have no idea, never read it.
The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford (I think) – out of print but seminal early 80s work
Apart from them read books like …
Trigger Happy by Steven Poole
Joystick Nation by JC Herz
Game Over – How Nintendo Conquered the World by David Sheff
Revolutionaries at Sony by Reiji Asakura
Opening the Xbox by Dean Takahashi
The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steve L. KentAs for web sites
http://www.gamasutra.com/ # especially the lectures at GDC, the Post mortems and the articles
http://www.ludology.org/
http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1822/ijigs11.htm
http://www.gamestudies.org/ # not that it’s ever updated
http://www.joystick101.org/
http://www.knowledge.hut.fi/projects/games/gamelinks.html
http://www.game-research.com/Hope that’s enough :)”
Erm… yeah… I reckon that’ll keep me occupied for a while…
Filed under: Strategy and process
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Filed under: Blog watch
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Coverage is here, but where are the liveblogs? Anyone know?
Filed under: Conferences and events
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Matt Webb had three weetabix this morning. He’s just posted a summation of stuff on ‘semantic/social substrate’ that’s been bubbling away inside him for a while.
Tying-in old Webb hits such as the isomorphic nature of interfaces, with some new material like the loam-thing, and the now-popular pub-riff: ‘how to make blogchalking actually work’:
“I’d like to see a grand conversation between the authors of publishing tools pinning down the properties weblogs need to fulfil their potential, and then building these in invisibly for the user. Because weblogs have yet to expand as much as they will, and when they do their course will be hard to change. The future has to be built now, in this microcosm, in this monobloc.”
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“This is the next century
Where the universal’s free”
Blur: “The Universal”
Read this entry over at Kottke.org, which started me trying to sublimate my thoughts around a recent mental obsession: the universal machine. So bear with me while I try and stick ‘em here in the outboard brain.
Universal machines are the idea at the centre of what is being defended or railed against lately, whether it’s copyright protection, Palladium,
Broadband-doesn’t-need-content, or OpenSource.
For instance, Jon Udell’s take on Palladium (which in turn quotes from a salon article):
“Society must either give up on copy protection or the general-purpose PC and the Net.” And no matter how hard Hollywood tries, Felten argues, society will eventually choose the latter because “the sheer value of the Net and computers is so much greater than any value that copy protection can provide.”
Here is the use of an innocuous but super-important phrase, refering to computers, the net, and digital devices as a whole: “general-purpose”
The fabulous (and British-invented!) concept of the ‘general-purpose universal machine’ is under attack in all these arguements.
The subtext is if Palladium, or something similar succeeds, then values will be hardwired into that which was formally Turing’s “universal machine”. The personal computer, will be bounded by a set of values, set-up to tip the balance against the edge, the individual and towards the centre, the corporate.
As the picture is consistently painted, these vested interests are looking to preserve a market hegemony over data and intellectual property. They would rather that the heterarchy of the web looked more like a tree structure, or a river delta where all the tributraries of attention (and value) flowed to them.
Alan Turing’s legacy is at the centre of all these issues… I think it should come out in the open and be debated of itself. It’s value should be promoted and understood by all.
The Felten quote assumes that “the sheer value” of this big and tricky concept is self-evident. Just look at the comments on Jason’s piece about explaining the damn thing. It’s not.
The best I’ve seen is Mr. Scott McCloud’s explanation in Reinventing Comics. There is about a 5-6 page diversion where he stops to explain where computers and the internet evolved from, and why they are strange, different and powerful additions to the canon of human invention.
I photocopied (ahem.. fair-use?? ach… sorry Scott) this section and put it in the pigeonholes of everyone in Sapient London. Stimulated a lot of great discussion, and more importantly understanding of why we (the design team) loved the web. As a base-line, a glossary for understanding, it was great.
And finally:
“An environment which is ordered in precise and final detail may inhibit new patterns of activity. A landscape whose every rock tells a story may make difficult the creation of fresh stories. Although this may not seem to be a critical issue in our present urban chaos, yet it indicates that what we seek is not a final but an open-ended order, capable of continuous further development”
Kevin Lynch – The Image of the City, 1963
The universal machine is damn important. Selling it’s importance right now in ways which real people get is imperative. The connected fate of cities, software and minds… may depend on it?
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Some great articles over at Shift Magazine right now.
One is a review of current ‘eco-tech’ innovators:
“Technology has enormous potential to clean lakes, purify the air and soil, reduce our landfills, reverse climate change, even revitalize our economy. But more of us need to step up to the karmic plate and demonstrate its umpteen green applications.Thankfully, some of us already are. “
Somewhat related to this, Phil is blogging his experiences at the World Future Society’s conference in Philadelphia, USA over at his site Overmorgen, starting here.
The other article that caught my eye on the Shift site, was a ‘future of ideas’meetsadbusters style piece on the bleak prospects that current thinking and action by commerce on copyright and interllectual property are making possible.
“Lets not be any more naïve than we have been already. Copyright will not go away in our lifetime. Neither will trademarks and neither will patents. But consider this: As new technologies undermine the business models of the big intellectual property owners, those big intellectual property owners are seeking new ways to defend and enlarge their turf, and this is not a done deal. New and odious bits of IP statute and regulation are showing up in our legislatures and our Parliaments all the time, but they can be stopped, the same way anything else ugly and stupid can be stopped.They can be stopped by vigorous and sensible public debate, by people who know their culture is under seige and who are committed to helping their fellow citizens understand. This is not pretty or simple, but making law and influencing public policy have never been pretty or simple. Our culture is private because the law has allowed it to become so, and the law can begin to swing the pendulum back, but making it so will require a delicate and persistent effort in the backrooms, in the courts, and in the streets. “
» Shift magazine: “THE PRIVATIZATION OF OUR CULTURE”
Filed under: Misc.
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Just heard something about the Earth Simulator on BBC Radio4’s ‘Leading Edge’ science magazine programme.
Immediately, simultaneously reminded of Gelertner’s “Mirror Worlds” and Morrison’s Filth.
Filed under: Society and culture
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Lee has blogged his rough notes from the talk Jessica Hammer gave us at BBCi on Monday.
She was great – really chewy stuff, sparking a lot of ideas and arguements it’s wake.
» evilcoffee.org / blog / Jessica Hammer – Interactive Narratives
Filed under: Society and culture
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...may never die, or at least need to change a light bulb. This story on BBC News Online starts with one of the most astonishing paragraphs I’ve ever read:
“One of the most important principles of physics, that disorder, or entropy, always increases, has been shown to be untrue. “
Shout if you can see the J-curve from where you are.
Filed under: Society and culture
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Astonishingly light piece around the UK’s version of BigBrother on how people will want to pay for ‘high quality broadband content’ in the media guardian today.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t find a single figure in terms of usage or revenue to support the case that the content-providers are making in the piece.
I think this makes it three weeks in a row that the mediagrauniad have written a puff piece about broadband content providers. All have pretty much been pegged around a report that the British Government released a few weeks back which said that high-quality content was the essential spur needed to drive take-up of broadband. As far as I can tell, this report was written by a working group dominated by those who would profit from the creation and subsidy of a ‘broadband content industry’.
On receipt of the first piece the mediagrauniad ran, Cory wrote an excellent rebuttal (here and furthermore, here), and Steve Bowbrick wrote an interesting supporting piece (but his permalinks aren’t working… so go to http://www.bowbrick.com/bowblog/ and scroll down to the july 3rd entry).
Despite working for a ‘content company’. I’m on Cory’s side. I’d love to see there be a dialogue on this issue between the onlinegrauniad and their friends in the media section. Or at least a bit of representation of opposing views or at the very least an intelligent critique of some sort in the media section, instead of it merely serving as a mouth-piece for those who ‘would say that wouldn’t they’.
Filed under: Society and culture
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From an interview with Phil Condit, CEO of Boeing:
“In the six years since he and his executive team put together Vision 2016, they have transformed Boeing from a maker of airplanes into a “systems integrator”, a vision, he says, buttressed by this week’s merger. Now, building on the experiences of the war in Afghanistan and, with savage irony, the opportunities provided by September 11, he wants to go further and place Boeing at the forefront of what the Pentagon calls “system-centric warfare”: commanding and controlling the low- or no-casualty (of friendly forces) battlefield of the future.And, going beyond that, helping to revitalise big cities with an integrated transport network that overcomes congestion and enables the public to be “mobile and connected”, capable via broadband of communicating while travelling.”
With my carfreelondon hat on, I’ve been trying to find more stuff on the ‘integrated transport network’ mentioned in this article with no avail. Anyone got any leads for me?
Filed under: Society and culture
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Tom, Celyn and Mark are mad and must be stopped. Go and look at their sketchbooks and see why.
Celyn also did our illustrations for carfreelondon.
» FizzyEye
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“Disney personally introduced the first television show, “Man in Space,” which aired on ABC on March 9, 1955. The objective, he said, was to combine “the tools of our trade with the knowledge of the scientists to give a factual picture of the latest plans for man’s newest adventure.” He later called the show “science factual.” The show represented something new in its approach to science. But it also relied on Disney’s trademark animation techniques.For example, a portion of the show was devoted to explaining basic scientific principles using an animated bust of Sir Isaac Newton. In one scene, an animated puppy sneezes and moves backward across a sheet of graph paper to illustrate that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Disney also filled “Man in Space” with stereo-typical images of learning and science. For example, Disney appears on camera against a bookcase backdrop and introduces producer Ward Kimball complete with a sketch pencil behind his ear.”
» “The Disney-Von Braun Collaboration and Its Influence on Space Exploration”
Filed under: Misc.
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From linkmachinego:
“I know a lot of artists …like the art to be very, very simple, and leave the detail up to the mind of the reader, but what about leaving it in the mind of the writer and artist, and allow us to bring you into our world and let the reader visit what weve envisioned, a complete vision something that is three dimensional and totally realized and will take you completely out of yourself.”
On Monday we have the good fortune to have Jessica Hammer visiting us here to talk about her work: “Six Principles: Toward a Theory of Interactive Narrative”, in which she discusses the counterpoint to the above view – shared authorship:
“The principle of shared authorship addresses the question of who is the author of an interactive story. A single author cannot create enough meaningful content to have a story that is both powerful and interactive, and artificial intelligence is not yet sophisticated enough to have truly computer-generated narratives. To incorporate the human ability to tell a story with the flexibility and interactivity of computer-generated stories, many people must participate in the authorship of the story. A group of users share the duties of authorship, creating a story that makes sense on a human level but is being created in real-time (rather than being authored in advance).”
Looking forward to it. Hopefully I’ll get some notes from her talk up here next week.
» “Six Principles: Toward a Theory of Interactive Narrative”
Some network/fileserver connection problems, and getting used to a different keyboard layout but pretty much smooth and wonderful experience so far. Somewhat optimistically I’ve borrowed a friend’s copy of “Learning Perl” causing nervous-shudders from colleagues.
Things I just can’t get over:
Filed under: Misc.
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