Blackbeltjones/Work “The cosmos is a deeply dangerous thing to think about - into it, vacant minds expand” - Dr. Jonathan Miller

“The Spring Desktop is concept-centric, not file, folder, site, or brand-centric. It’s designed for the way you naturally think.”

» Spring [via interconnected]

Filed under: Interface innovations
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How green is your laptop? A thread on the awesome Barbelith Underground about sustainable computing musing about more viridian design alternatives has emerged:

“Machines are constructed to obsolescence – especially computers. That’s about as environmentally friendly as disposable batteries and plastic bags. It’s a lunacy.

So where are the computers built to last? The boxes made of something other than plastic, where modular components can be inserted, discarded, or added on as new levels of power become available?”

I have a very beautiful sliver of titanium, silicon, polycarbonate etc. on my desk that is the result of some fairly intensive and wasteful wittling down from enormous lumps of ore and rock.

At Doors6, John Thackara questioned precisely this myth that computing technology was ‘lightweight’ by asking the audience to imagine the ‘ecological rucksack’ that his powerbook actually represented – the raw materials discarded in order to manufacture the objects that power what we perceive to be lightweight, modern and immaterial. He paced the stage describing the 50ft by 50ft by 50ft cube of material that had to be winnowed down into the A4-sized plastic clam of his powerbook. Very powerful mental image.

» Barbelith Underground >> Laboratory >> Sustainable computers?

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N.B. Doors7 earlybird registration closes tommorrow. I just registered. Andrew Otwell has posted an eloquent description of why it’s such a great event. I;d only add that, at the time of going to my first Doors I was left baffled and unmoved by a lot of it, and thought I may have wasted my money… only to find themes and ideas from the event percolating up through my thoughts and into my work for the rest of the year…

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Zelda’s got just the thing for you:

“ZeldaChat came about because information wants to be free…well actually because I was working for a company that made using instant messaging a sackable offence. This little chat app will work through firewalls, and doesn’t store your conversation…so no one’s any the wiser!”

» BadZelda.com: Secret Chat

Filed under: Interface innovations
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From the excellent growing debate and commentary section “The People Vs Copyright” at Opendemocracy.net:

“Quite simply, then, copyright turns symbolic forms into property, and market conditions ensure it is held and exploited by corporations. But this is not a reality which sits very easily with public opinion. For while the concept of private property in tangible goods, or chattels, is deeply ingrained in Western societies, the same cannot be said about symbolic works. A strong consensus, emerging first in the Enlightenment, has it that culture should circulate freely. The Romantic movement then contributes the idea that art and commerce are opposed, that the artist is in heroic opposition to the drive for profit.

It is something of a contradiction, then, that in the modern era the figure of the Romantic artist is invoked to justify copyright – the very basis of commerce in culture.”

» Opendemocracy.net: “Beyond romance and repression: social authorship in a capitalist age” by Jason Toynbee

Filed under: Society and culture
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Wonderful little site (uses frames) showcasing the work of reknowned futurist and illustrator Syd Mead.

» Scrubbles.net: The Syd Mead Project

Filed under: Product design
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Zac Monro, a British 30-something architect “>has won the World Air-Guitar crown for the second time, with a spirited rendition of ‘Fell in love with a girl’ by the White Stripes.

Three points I’d like to make:

• Ladies – air guitar, done right can be sexy. Look at Zac and deny this. Come to Fat Tony’s and witness equally masterful displays!
  
• “Fell in love with a girl” sounds amazing played on an accordion. How the hell do you play ‘air-accordion’?
  
• Architects rule!
  

Okay. Sorry. I promise I will write something about design soon. Although I find leaping around doing air-guitar integral to the process of creating great user-experiences.

Filed under: Misc.
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A useful little roundup from Alex Wright.

Filed under: Misc.
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This is interesting. Ray Ozzie’s company, Groove, is working towards a ‘blog-policy’ which clarifies the rights and responsibilties of the companies employees when writing personal content on their weblogs.

» Ray Ozzie’s Weblog: Weblog policy

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Iain Banks interviewed in today’s Grauniad (my emboldening):

‘Does he genuinely foresee a bright future for the human race like the one laid down in his Culture series? “The optimistic answer is that perhaps we can alter ourselves. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with genetic modification; and if there is a bigotry gene, then they should start work modifying us. We are our technology, and we can’t turn our backs on it.“’

» Guardian: Books | Iain Banks interview: “The word factory”

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This post comes with a very big “my views may not be representative of my employer” sticker.

Channelsurfing in New York last weekend made me realise how very very lucky were are in the UK. We get the best television from the USA, filtered and aggregated – with none of the visual spam. Written about this before, but it’s suddenly a hot topic again amongst industry-leaders, with a leader on the very same subject in today’s Grauniad.

“He [Mark Thompson, CEO of the Uk’s Channel4] complains of British TV being “dull, and mechanical and samey” and looks enviously at the United States for complex modern TV, such as Six Feet Under or 24. The glib response to this is that the best place to watch American television is not over there but over here: because you can enjoy the comparatively small number of big creative successes, while avoiding the multichannel dross that goes with it.

The argument that we need more creative risk in British television – which Lord Puttnam drew attention to earlier this month – is important. (There is a case for saying that allowing US takeovers of British television companies, as the government would like, is more likely to produce extra outlets for existing US shows than nurturing indigenous talent.) But no one seems to know how to switch on this creative talent.”

Okay – well here’s a half-baked suggestion from someone who knows almost nothing about the TV industry. Clay and myself had a good debate about this when he was over in July.

It’s a structural problem.

In the USA, the ‘winner-takes-all’ nature of the TV industry means that all is risked on successfully ‘creating worlds’ – franchises that can live in syndication and other mediums.

The typical 22 episode (24, obviously in ‘24’’s case…) ‘season’ that US television has as it’s basic unit of commissioning means that rich, complex characters can be developed; sophisticated, intertwined story-arcs can be woven and worlds can be built

Compare and contrast if you will ‘Spooks’, which while trumpeted as an example of how Brit-TV can match the USA in terms of production values and ambition; failed miserably in terms of building characters*, story-arc and worldbuilding. Some of the writing was promising, so what would have been built if the creators had 22 episodes to paint their world rather than the measly 6×1 hour episodes that the BBC gave them?

The only British TV series I can think of doing this apart from soap-operas like Eastenders, are long-gone: The Prisoner, The Avengers and of course, The Doctor.

HBO’s business model rests on the fact that people will only pay for stuff that is scarce – namely excellence: writing, acting and direction that is of an astounding quality. These factors plus the tendency that the rewards to creator-ownership of these franchises makes a market for quality that we simply cannot realise in the UK right now.

» The Guardian: Leader: “TV’s creative deficit”

• apart from the terrific Hugh Laurie who played an insanely brutal and stylish head of MI6 worthy of the pen of Grant Morrison or Garth Ennis, the dramatis-personae of Spooks were bunch of wishy-washy second-hand soap-opera ciphers – Jack Bauer would have kicked the crap out of the whiny lead character in Spooks who’s name I can’t even remember without refering to the website in a nanosecond

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“Although violent crimes are committed in other parks around the city, Freeway Park is distinct in the sense that it’s hard to separate its crimes from its design.”

» TheStranger.com: TOPOGRAPHY OF TERROR by Charles Mudede
[thanks Alex!]

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Fascinating article in the Grauniad today examining the origin of “al-Qaida” and the possible links to the Foundation series by Asimov, including the methodologies and mythologies of it’s central character, Hari Seldon.

“Seldon, like Bin Laden, transmits videotaped messages for his followers, recorded in advance. There is also some similarity in geopolitical strategy. Seldon’s vision seems oddly like the way Bin Laden has conceived his campaign. “Psycho-history” is the statistical treatment of the actions of large populations across epochal periods – the science of mobs as Asimov calls it. “Hari Seldon plotted the social and economic trends of the time, sighted along curves and foresaw the continuing and accelerating fall of civilisation.”

So did Bin Laden use Foundation as a kind of imaginative sounding-board for the creation of al-Qaida? Perhaps reading the book in his pampered youth, and later on seeing his destiny in terms of the ruthless manipulation of historical forces? Did he realise much earlier than anyone else that the march of globalisation would provide opportunities for those who wanted to rouse and exploit the dispossessed?”

It goes on to discuss the influence of ‘foundation myth’:

“More generally, the space opera sub-genre of science fiction offers the possibility of a massive expansion of self-mythologising will-to-power. In a 1999 New Yorker article on galactic empires, Oliver Moreton beamed up French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, author of The Poetics of Space, to explain all this: ‘Immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. Daydream undoubtedly feeds on all kinds of sights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur. And this contemplation produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.’”

Tangent, sidenote-to-self: What influence does the emerging doctrine of emergence and network-theory have on these world-views? Are there the seeds of more mythology and madness in the small-worlds view? Would it underline in the mind of a modern-day Hari Seldon the possiblity of prosecuting a psychohistorical masterplan against the powers-that-be?

And the last words goes on the power of foundation-myth vs the views of French philosophers go to David Rees of ‘Get your war on’ fame:

“Most of his e-mails these days are from fans, but he does receive the occasional bit of hate-mail.

“You people make me sick and I hope all of you are beaten in the street like the hippies you are,” begins one such missive. “If you people have such a big problem with President Bush and the war, than [sic] move somewhere like France where being a pussy is welcomed,” the writer continues, before finishing with a flourish: “Take a shower and cut your dreads off, fag.”

Rees, who for the record lives in New York with his fiancée, Sarah Lariviere, and whose hair is generally lightly tousled, finds this sort of communiqué ironic, since he too got swept up in the patriotic fervor after Sept. 11.

“The attacks made me think a lot about America, the things I like and dislike about it,” he said. “I got a copy of the U.S. Constitution and read it through a few times. I do think America is a remarkable nation in many ways, and our founding documents are incredible. “

» The Guardian: Review: “War of the worlds”

» Chapel Hellion: David Rees Interview [via the LMG]

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“All architects long for the defining project, the high-profile plum job that people will remember them by, for good or bad. At 63, that death-or-glory moment has arrived for Sir Richard MacCormac. He has plucked the plum of plums, the rebuilding of the BBC’s Broadcasting House. It comes with a price tag of at least £400m.”

One thing that isn’t mentioned are the new technologies that might be available for use within or without the building’s working and public spaces by the time it’s ready to be occupied (in 2008!)

Putting to one side the advances in pervasive computing that might affect personal working style, there are the advances in technology which will affect building use, building fabric and it’s relationship with the city:

• Building use patterns
  
  
  
  • Ideo/Steelcase p2p wireless meeting room organisers:
    save facilities managers space that can be turned over to other uses as they use communal meeting space more efficiently
    
  • Wireless tech in general.
    

• Building fabric
  
  • Too much to list here for now… but will add some more links (suggest some!) but for now, I’ll just point to Michael McDonough and Bruce Sterling’s WiReD piece on Biotecture/’bambootekture’: “Newer New York”
    

• Urban relationships and mediatecture
  
  Mediatecture – or the use of dynamic digital media as facade of public buildings has a profound effect on public space.
  
  
  
  • Lehman Brothers, Times Sq. New York City:
    saw this last weekend, absolutely incredible, mesmerising facade swept by animating waterfalls, clouds, sunsets… the pastoral/cosmic aesthetic that is ‘so hot right now’ and kind of comically inappropriate to a megacorp such as Lehman’s, but beautifully realised by the architects, engineers and media-artists.
    
  • Lisa Strausfeld/InformationArt’s amazing, densely-layered media wall for the new Penn Station.
    
  • And of course, the Nasdaq wall
    

Will the BBC and their architects embrace these changes between then and now, or in 6 years will we have a landmark built for now – not then?

» Hughpearman.com: Heart of an empire: MacCormac rebuilds the BBC.

Filed under: Architectural and urban design
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Dan’s put together a great long post covering his thoughts on adaptive design and what he calls ‘The New Rationalism’. Well worth a read.

“Design dissolves in behaviour” is a beautiful quote that Dan uses in the post, which comes from Naoto Fuksawa, which I fully intend to overuse and generally beat people around the head with until they’re sick of hearing it.

» Cityofsound: “The New Rationalism”

Filed under: Strategy and process
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Hello… Come and try out an experiment we’re running on the BBC News website (probably will make more sense or be more satisfying if you are in the UK).

Dan Gillmor’s notions of the ‘the former audience’ have inspired us to come up with ‘the remote-control reporter’:

“We asked you to debate which of four ideas BBC News Online should take up for an investigation this summer.

The four subjects are fly tipping, speed cameras, UK-US price differences and support for the mentally ill. Soon we will decide which subject we will tackle. Then we will ask you for your input on how you think the investigation should progress over the next few weeks.

The process will continue until we reach a conclusion. That conclusion, of course, may not be the one you expect. That’s the point of investigation.”

I love this. While it’s not the collaborative media that Dan described in his talk, it’s an encouraging step for the mainstream media and the mainstream of internet users – who are not all as comfortable with posting to mefi, kuro5hin or slashdot as we might like to think.

It’s going to be fascinating to see how it progresses.

» BBC News : Politics: “What should we investigate?”

Filed under: Misc.
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From a Will Wright interview on gamestudies.org in which he talks about his design philosophies and what he’s learnt from building his various Sim-Everythings:

“At some level I want people to have a deep appreciation for how connected things are at all these different scales, not just through space, but through time. And in doing so I had to build kind of a simple little toy universe and say, here, play with this toy for a while.

My expectations when I hand somebody that toy are that they are going to make their own mental model, which isn’t exactly what I’m presenting them with. But whatever it is, their mental model of the world around them, and above them and below them, will expand.

Hopefully, probably in some unpredictable way, and for me that’s fine. And I don’t want to stamp the same mental model on every player. I’d rather think of this as a catalyst.

You know, it’s a catalytic tool for growing your mental model, and I have no idea which direction it’s going to grow it, but I think just kind of sparking that change is worthwhile unto itself.”

This is exactly where my head is right now. Don’t Make Me Think = Don’t Let Me Play. There are a set of emerging technologies and applications which demand that play be part of their existence. That how the individual flows through the experience is not determined by rigid persona-driven design, but by the feedback loops of both their ongoing behaviour within the system and the socially-generated structure created by their peers within the system. They demand that we construct our own understanding: play with the system in order to understand it and extend their understanding of whatever the digital experience is simulating or augmenting in the real world.

Winnowing down tasks to those that a user can follow on trammels, making language and location unambiguous, communication clear and concise – and all the other good stuff we practice every day when making online experiences have their place for the majority of applications, but not for social-software.

Designing the topography for play, the landscape to enable all these possible flows, all these possible experiences; and making it sustainable, enjoyable and viable to build is something that needs attention in the theory and practice of user-experience design. Maybe those in e-learning field as well as the games industry have much for me to learn from?

I’m slap-bang in the middle of this right now – Just started with a team trying to create a very complex suite of ‘social software’ that supports all sorts of complex experiences. I’ll try and report back on the failures and sucesses of designing in this domain as often as I can.

But while I’m at the beginning, does anyone have any wisdom to share?

Filed under: Society and culture
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Sat here in eyebeam, NYC on Jonah Perreti’s iBook; where in about 30 minutes I’m due to give a talk on the curse of warchalking…

It’s a pretty amazing space – a large warehouse in the Chelsea district of New York, with some hip conversion touches, but nothing too invasive. In the main room there is a huge fuzzy fur, fabric and UV paint map of manhattan, with little dots marked all over it representing CCTV cameras. One of the other activities in the “I Love NY” event that my talk is part of was a ‘camspotting’ tour of manhattan.

Hopefully this talk will put the lid on the whole warchalking thing for me personally and pass it into the care of the community that’s formed around it so I can get on with the next thing. The next thing being getting really stuck into exploring “Social Software”.

The legacy of ETCON continues, and is starting to permeate the ‘real world’ of my work at the BBC. Looks like social network analysis and tools will pplay an important part of the next few projects I’m doing, and Jonah’s group at Eyebeam are full of good advice and contacts.

Hurrah!

Filed under: Conferences and events
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Victor cheers me up:

“Technology advances and, amazingly, becomes less expensive. We figure out new ways to use it. We adapt to it and it to us as a matter of habit. If there’s a reason we don’t want to use it, fine, then we won’t. But if we want to, we’ll find a way to make it workable. Being too hard isn’t a reason to dismiss it.

Invent! Refine! Design!”

Yup. I reckon that’s the right way around.

» Noise Between Stations: ‘Just Keep Trying’

Filed under: Strategy and process
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I love density of ideas. I love books like Snowcrash and Distress simply because of the idea-per-page quotient. The IPPQ slingshots you out from the book and into the world that it’s pages happen to cut across. You stop and move away from the narrative and unpack the ideas; and in books with a really high IPPQ you can barely catch mental-breath as even the most throwaway lines unfurl like idea-origami.

No pages as such… but Idea per PANEL quotient in The Spiders is through the roof. The alternate war-against-terrorism as prosecuted by President Gore is mind-blowing. Ecstasy Bombs, non-lethal laser weapons and live chat with Taliban soldiers via tiny remote-operated robot spiders… Incredible stuff.

» E-Sheep : ‘The Spiders’ : Part 3 of 4 [via boingboing]

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Matt Patterson has emailed me with a great response to my post on humanising technology, which he’s kindly allowed me post here:

Matt,

I seem to recall making a couple of ill-prepared parries when we talked briefly about humanising technology. The concept has been bugging me and I’ve finally managed to find time to sketch out an argument. (you should try thinking about design and organising a wedding simultaneously…)

> 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’...

I think that you hit on a fundamental problem with the way we deal with technology. I’m not convinced by your flint axes thing, more of which later.

> To separate and demonise ‘technology’ seems false. It’s what makes us
> human. It’s our evolutionary distinctiveness.

The separation and making occult of technology is the story of late-modern technological development (commercially exploited, industrial revolution onwards). The separation of technology and making it hidden served the purposes of the possessors of technology – it made them money, and prevented other people from competing with them. Even earlier than late-modern we have the fuss caused by the publishing of Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises – the first howto for printing. It told of printing, and of building printing machinery. The ‘black art’ wasn’t called that for nothing – printing was a skill closely guarded and passed on through apprenticeships, thus keeping the number of competitors down. Conditions imposed on journeymen workers – graduated apprentices – bear this out.

> 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 think you’re missing the point, as are the Design Council. I think you’re both missing by a whisker. Technology has always been about a certain kind of distance, of abstraction. Axes and spears allowed the abstraction of killing – it didn’t have to be by hand anymore. Neither were the axes about technologising cro-magnons, by which I mean moving society’s centre from family grouping to proto-NRA axe clubs. They were about enabling society’s centre to remain where it was in changing times. There is evidence which suggests that agriculture was developed as a response to changing climate forcing people to invent new technology to remain living as they were.

Having said this it’s also clear that as technology begins to change our interactions with the world those interactions begin to change us. Agriculture allowed sufficient quantities of food to be grown to enable people to survive in their changing climate while the need to tend crops forced nomadic peoples to settle.

> 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.

I think that’s probably a misinterpretation of his position (or at least, it’s a misinterpretation of my interpretation…). Mediated experiences are the problem here, where the mediations are obfuscations, enforcing agendas and denying access. As for the thrall and the schism I think we need look no further than the legacy of the industrial revolution’s occult entreprenurial technological capitalism on the one hand, and the desire for recognition and status among techies which has led to l33t h4×0rs on the other. Schism is good for business, and schism allows an poorly-understood morlock workforce to become insular and dependent on that insularity for status and approbation.

An interesting counter here is the shaman. The shaman was the possessor of occult knowledge, to be sure, but they were are critical part of the life and community of the tribe. I think we can blame western society’s stratification and segregation for the acceptance of the schism.

> 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?

I think we have to remember that Unix was conceived as something of a humanising technology thing. It tried to take all the good bits from everything that had gone before and threw in some new bits which would help make everything work better and me easier to understand. I’m under the distinct impression that Unix gave us hierarchical filing systems.

Perhaps we (by which I mean any of us who speak Command Line) are operating under a similar delusion to the people who use GUIs – that we are controlling our computer entirely, that it works the way we want – with the only difference being a generational one (of use not age).

Perhaps the difference between you or I and George in reception is that we have seen the patterns in what happens and can abstract, generalise, and re-use that information. I cannot write C or assembler – they are too low-level, but I can write Perl, and the patterns I have seen in Perl allow me to talk to and understand people who programme in Assembler.

A way forward could be this: that we (as a society) stop seeing techies as a separate breed, but integrate them back into the normal flow of life and work. This ought to have the benefits of making non-morlocks less like eloi and non-eloi more like morlocks – with everyone meeting in the middle. Along with this runs the thread of understanding what other people do, and thus being able to build systems which work for them, and thus re-establishing a degree of transparency in the way things work.

Other things would begin to taught in such a way that the patterns and abstractions would be recognised and emphasised so that people could talk to each other and understand, in part, what the others were saying. More transparency.

I don’t think we can abandon the idea of separate roles. I learnt to do division on paper in junior school. They don’t do that now, they have calculators all the way. This means that other things can be learnt, and new things can be learnt at the other end. This is how we progress, surely: we build on an established base
of knowledge by using it and not reinventing the wheel. We build up dependencies here: to do maths I need a calculator so I need someone to build me a calculator… The critical part is to maintain a diverse community, so that I
understand that there are dependencies, and that things do not exist in isolation.

In a talk at DIS Tom Moran talked about adaptive design – systems which are built on top of by users, so that the systems become shaped by the way people work and not the other way around. Perhaps a notion of diversity will allow people to move the focus of design from the final whole to the unfinished, evolving, connections. I think that a Lego Technics operating system would allow a degree of transparent abstraction: that my mum could use the system arranged as it came (perhaps a racing car [with moving engine, gears, etc]).

However, the fact that the system is a synthetic construction is obvious, even if Mum can’t quite formulate an entirely new synthesis. She probably will be able to add bits, or take some bits away. Someone else (me, perhaps) will strip the construction back to its constituents and reconstruct, reformulate and make the racing car into a space ship.

With Lego Technics set the thing which allows me to do all this is the fact that connectors are almost entirely universal, so I can recombine bits as I like.

Enough!

Regards,

Matt

Matt’s site: EmDash is awfully pretty.

Peterme also gave me a good fact-checking and raking over the coals about that post, and I’d recommend you read that too.

Dan Hill has some more Tom-Moran-inspired tangents here.

I haven’t really got a good response to any of this at the moment, and I think I’ll just be content to stay at an unreasonable, sloppily-thought-out, superposition for now…

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