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

Andy Hertzfeld on Chandler:

“We have a commitment to lowering the bar for scripting by using a graphical front-end for scripting. The hard part of programming has traditionally been keeping the universe of possibilities in their head, but programming is actually pretty constrained. We want to have a graphic front-end to the script so that users don’t have to keep in their head all the vocabulary, all the verbs. (Audience interruption: Like Frox? A: Yeah, like Frox, which was a project I worked on a long time ago. I actually think of it more like Hypercard. It’s a shame that the state of the art is now 15 years old.) Users should be able to basically select things from menus to write scripts, instead of having to be a programmer.”

This is great. Downloaded Squeak and was taken-aback to see a shrinkwrapped copy of Hypercard at the Apple store last week… Correct me if I’m wrong, but here’s little or no “consumer”-friendly programming applications or langauages being offered, let alone pushed these days?

How can we work to drop the barriers to being a builder? Alan Kay referenced Seymour Papert in his talk and came up with this great line:

“point of view is worth 80 IQ points”

...in relation to idea that it’s far easier to learn how the world works by building models of it.

Mentioned the idea of B-Logo before, perhaps it’s time to think harder about it.

After all the BBC sponsored the development of a programming language once before…

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Two from the Financial Times’ Creative Business section

John Howkins on intellectual property:

“There’s a dual problem. At the beginning of the creative process we want to scavenge without hindrance, picking up ideas from everywhere and re-working them. We want the public domain to be vast and to have the imagination’s equivalent of the ramblers’ right to roam. Then, as we shape our ideas, we want to claim them as our own and sell and license them to whoever will buy.”

FT Creative Business: Balancing right and reason: John Howkins

Howkins mentions an event on May 21st discussing such things, with anarchists and revolutionaries such as Lord Bell, Alan Yentob, and The Rt Hon Lord Heseltine CH. Expect fireworks!

Secondly, Patrick Barwise of the London Business School on PVRs, and the structural change wrought by technology on the media which has been discounted post-bubble:

“The first PVRs were launched in the US in 1999 by TiVo and ReplayTV, two Silicon Valley start-ups. The initial response was a lot of media hype, excitement among the digerati and some hysteria in the TV advertising world. Then the dotcom bubble burst, only about 17 people bought PVRs and everyone lost interest.

But there are three key facts about PVRs which mean the respite is only temporary.

First, once someone has lived with a PVR for more than a few days, they never go back to live TV and a VCR as their only means of time-shifting. This degree of commitment suggests PVRs will be hugely successful once more consumers understand the benefits’ essentially being able to watch what you want, when you want ? which are relevant to anyone with a TV, not just technology freaks.

Second, those who have adopted PVRs use them a lot. Estimates vary, but some studies suggest that as much as 70 per cent of their viewing is off the PVR rather than live. By contrast, in VCR households, only 1 per cent of viewing is time-shifted because it takes so much effort. And where someone watches a time-shifted programme, they tend to skip the commercials. Again, estimates vary but, typically, someone watching off the PVR skips half the commercials, usually more.

Third, PVRs are increasingly being incorporated into cable and satellite set-top boxes and marketed by platform owners such as EchoStar in the US and Canal Plus in France. US penetration is already close to 2 per cent and is forecast to reach 30 per cent within five years. With heavyweight marketing, word-of-mouth and, perhaps, lower prices, the market is poised for take-off.

There seems to be a received wisdom on the faliure of Tivo in the UK and by extension the PVR as a class of device which predominates at the moment amongst the Tristrams* of broadcasting. “Ding-dong, the timeshifting witch is dead”. Media planners are not so sanguine. The structural change of the last five years has been masked by the bust and the market data, but not the studies of actual use by actual people as is shown above.

Filed under: Strategy and process
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“Our artists no longer try to put us in touch with God and the eternal, but with the infinity of our own archives.”

-James Flint on Brian Eno

» test.org.uk: Interlude – the digital sublime

Filed under: Society and culture
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At EtCon. Editing the slides for the talk that James and I are going to give this afternoon about the use of ethonography to drive a social software project, the backlight on the screen of my powerbook suddenly gave out.

The tech support, http://techitsolutions.com at the conference saved my life. The gave me an old monitor for the night to connect as an external screen so I could continue working. The hero of the hour gave me his business card. Looked at it this morning, and his name is Mike Tyson.

Blimey.

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At Etcon. Three tracks of talks (I was watching Tom Coates: more later). Via Wifi/Rendevous, was able to use Hydra to see who is taking notes of other talks in other rooms.

There are a couple of other pieces of software available to have a social discussion online while in the conference spaces (confab, intro, and an IRC channel to name a few) but the unintended consquences of Hydra in a wifi’d-conference situation compared to them is that you can tell who’s actually listening to the person on stage – and their level of investment in listening/annotating, rather than who’s talking, snarking and joking with each other (not to say this is a bad thing.)

Stephen Johnson wrote about how a parallel wifi-world can suck the laughter out of the real-world discussion. I’m starting to think that a “too-parallel”/non-real-world meshed communications environment can suck too much of the attention out of a room too. I’ve only used Confab, so I can’t talk about the experience of using Intro, and it is enmeshed with the real-world, but it’s bound tightly to the hotel map, to the geography of the space, rather than to the subject-matter of what’s being discussed in the space.

The Hydra model points to an “augmented-reality” conference experience, where the task-oriented nature of the tool keeps those it gathers together immersed in the real-world.

Filed under: Social Software
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Last night attended the Social Software BOF, where talk of the philosophy, implications, social-science, human-centred side of the field or practice was dismissed in favour of the “meat”: protocols, standards, technology.

The rage has subsided, kinda. Alan Kay’s humane, humanist view of innovation and technological exploration has cheered me up no-end.

Clay is about to speak on the subject of “a group being it’s own worst enemy”... in the meantime here’s Will Davies on the trivial problem of human nature and societal implications of social-software which, as I’ve now been informed by last night, needs no attention by those working on emerging technologies.

A sweeping generalisation, but it seems the discussion in the field in the UK seems to be much more driven by the social sciences and concerns of human(e) and inclusive design; even by the technologists.

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Being sent Hydra in a heartbeat over wifi/rendezvous in order to participate in a collaborative annotation of Eric Bonabeau’s biological computing talk. Tom has a screen grab of the document and notes on the experience.

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At Etcon. At “O’reilly Radar” session. Getting annoyed. Tim O’Reilly saying that watching the alphageeks is how to predict the future and create better things. Alphageeks as the bellweather for progress. Tech-trends are the leading, driving force of society. The Morlocks lead the Eloi. Trickle-down technological determinism. What about the Omega people, those who couldn’t care less about technology in and of it’s own sake. Could studying their needs and and inclusively designing products, services and strategies be a Better Way™

Filed under: Conferences and events
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I’m in Santa Clara at ETCON. Last year, I travelled down from San Francisco on the CalTrain, through a landscape I was not familiar with the reality of, but had visted a thousand times in movies and on the television: American Suburbia.

This year is a little different, as I have a hire car. A four-wheeled symphony in biege, it’s transformed my view of the burbscape.

Last year, I was stuck in the hotel, and at the mercy of those who could give me a ride in their cars. This year, I am the master of my own velocity. I can go where I want, when I want.

My when’s been screwed-up by the jetlag, and my where by the burbscape. There’s no centre to the sprawl. The “cities” of Santa Clara, Sunnyvale and San Jose spread their edges into each other, seen from the freeway. Signage is the only declaration of division; the only tell-tale of the territory.

“There’s no there, there” as Gertrude Stein said. No sense of place or centre. Impossible to find, impossible to feel. Reyner Banham christened this “autopia” in “Los Angeles: the architecture of four ecologies”. Built around the car, and the freedom of movement that promises. Radically decentralising and dehumanising the intersitial space and arteries of the city.

I’d read his and other accounts of this ecology, this mental and physical landscape, but to experience it is disturbing. Driving to the hotel yesterday, it finally came home to me exactly how radical the Segway Human Transporter is within this context. It always seemed kind of cool to me, but being a european city dweller, used to the walkable city; and moreover – a visitor to walkable American cities, such as NYC and SF; it was a revelation.

Coindentally, outside our room this morning lay USAToday, with a cover splash on the design of American cities being bad for people’s health and lifestyle:

“Why don’t Americans walk anywhere?

Old answer: They’re lazy.

New answer: They can’t.

There is no sidewalk outside the front door, school is 5 miles away, and there’s a six-lane highway between home and the supermarket.

Many experts on public health say the way neighborhoods are built is to blame for Americans’ physical inactivity—and the resulting epidemic of obesity. “

and further on in the article:

“Why you can’t walk there from here:

* Spread-out neighborhoods. Bigger houses on bigger lots mean neighborhoods stretch beyond walking distance for doing errands. * Zoning. Residential neighborhoods are far from jobs and shopping centers, even schools. * Reign of cars. Roads are built big and busy. Intersections and crosswalks are rare. Shopping centers and office parks are set in the middle of big parking lots, all of which have become dangerous places to walk. In many cul-de-sac suburbs and along shopping strips, sidewalks don’t exist.

Suddenly, the crowded city looks healthy.”

» USAToday: The way cities and suburbs are developed could be bad for your health by Martha T. Moore

Filed under: Society and culture
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Martin’s blog is becoming a great clearing house for links and smart commentary on search engines and findability:

“...a quote that i think should send chills down the spine of anyone running a web service that claims to care about their users and who thinks technology can solve search:

“Spending hours pouring over thousands of search queries, one can hear the pained voices of customers who are desperately looking for help. The…search engine, with its simple word spotting routines, can not come close to providing the expert support that a good clerk or call center representative can.”

» Currybet.net: the pained voices of customers who are desperately looking for help

Filed under: search and findability
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From his mailing-list, “bad signal”, Warren Ellis on creativity and recombinance:

“I still get asked with appalling regularity “where my ideas come from.”

Here’s the deal. I flood my poor ageing head with information. Any information. Lots of it. And I let it all slosh around in the back of my brain, in the part normal people use for remembering bills, thinking about sex and making appointments to wash the dishes.

Eventually, you get a critical mass of information. Datum 1 plugs into Datum 3 which connects to Datum 3 and Data 4 and 5 stick to it and you’ve got a chain reaction. A bunch of stuff knits together and lights up and you’ve got what’s called “an idea”.

And for that brief moment where it’s all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can’t be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein’s brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.

And… how it makes you feel:

“It’s ten past two in the morning, and I’m completely wired, caught up in the new thing, shivering and laughing and glowing in the dark. Just as well it’s the middle of the night. No-one would be safe from me right now. I could read their minds and take over their heartbeats with a glare.

Faster than the speed of anyone.

That’s how it works.”

» Warren Ellis: Bad Signal

Filed under: Comic Books, Mind Gangsters
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Mentioned Le Parkour as evidence of superhumanity before, and now Mr. Ellis has woven it into the awesome Global Frequency. Dan Hill and Chris Heathcote discuss it here.

In Dan’s post he goes on to mention “The Green Wave”, an almost mythic urban phenomenon, where one catches a wave of green (go) lights at traffic signals driving through central london.

I remember once in the middle of the night in San Francisco, being taken up to the top of a three-stepped hill (near the Mint?) by my friend Nicole, then a designer for WiReD. She waited at the lights, engine revving until the it hit green.

She hit the gas, and we barrelled down the hill… reaching the next set of lights just as it hit green – they were on one of the steps and we got a little air under us… Faster, and down the next set of lights, still on red…

Still on red…

Still on red…

They turned green the instant we passed them, almost as if in doing so we had activated them – and flew…

There I was, fingernails dug into the dashboard, grinning with fear and realization that I was in a thousand films at once. Films that had been born out of a location scout or director knowing that San Francisco allowed you to do this there, if you just let the city play with you hard enough.

Off to SF/Santa Clara tomorrow for O’Reilly EtCon, to meet up with the British Geek Expeditionary Force.

Hopefully see you there.

Filed under: Comic Books
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Search maven Martin Belam, and head of BBC info architecture and usability Margaret Hanley are speaking at the next London UPA meet on the 15th April.

Filed under: Conferences and events
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From an interview with E.O.Wilson, author of Consilience:

“Nematode worms, he says, account for four of every five animals living on Earth – and are so abundant that if the planet’s surface vanished, its “ghostly outline” could still be made out in the biomass of nematodes, almost all of species unknown.”

Fantastic.

» Harvard Magazine: E.O. Wilson: “Of Ants and Earth”
[via Aula]

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UPDATE: The “wormsphere” quote seems to be originally by N.A. Cobb in 1915. It’s a little longer, and if anything, a little more poetic:

“In short, if all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable, and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites.”

Filed under: Technology and science
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Putting a “pull” handle on the push side of a door. Here seen with the classic “hastily-laserprinted-correctional-signage” in the BBC New Media reception area.

What’s your T.T.D.D.T.D.M.T.M.M.E.E.?

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Update: As Chris Barrus points out… “Don’t these new media guys read The Design Of Everyday Things?”: Don Norman would indeed be pulling his beard out.

Filed under: Architectural and urban design
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The all-powerful LMG points to notes on Grant Morrison’s recent talk at the ICA [my emboldening]:

“Among the reminiscences and explainations of technique (“I write the background script, and when I get the pencils back, write the dialogue to match the art. It’s like working with actors.”), he explains why he thinks comics are so powerful as a medium.

“I think comics gain something from being drawn,” he says, “all that meticulous attention focussed on each line, on the pencils, and then the inks, it give them a special power,” and I pretty much miss what he says next while I think about that, and how it ties in with William Burroughs’ idea of energy ground down into and how maybe I’ve been misunderstanding what I’m doing when I draw out my strips (which, yes, I find difficult, frustrating, boring) and how maybe it isn’t about communicating well at all (sorry, Scott McCloud) but about the action of drawing over the story and thereby deepening and reiterating its its existence, making it bigger and more affecting simply by that action of paying minute attention, with your eyes, your hands, your pencil, your pen.

Deepening the groove until it resembles a canyon. I tune back in; he’s talking about sigils and how comics are sigils, or sigil-clusters. A sigil; the image or word which affects reality.”

» Grant Morrison: ten cats mad

Filed under: Comic Books
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Upmystreet.com is up for sale.

Filed under: Misc.
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I wish I’d gone to the IA summit this year. The notes, presentations and wrap-up articles are starting to appear, and it sounds like one hell of a wide-ranging and open-minded discussion of digital design.

One debate that seems to have opened-up is on spatial metaphors of information space versus more semantic approaches. My background in architecture probably biases my approach to the subject. I’ve done a lot of work looking at wayfinding and spatial/urban metaphors for building wayfinding systems, more of which later.

Butterfield and myself have had some good-natured ding dongs in the past over this. I can’t find the comment now, but Stewart’s general drift in these matters is summed up here:

” genuinely think the spatial metaphors are badly broken and if we begin our thinking in terms of “structures” which facilitate “navigation” thorugh “information space”, we can’t help but come up with designs which are saturated with spatial concepts.

But perception and cognition don’t go on in a spatial framework (with certain exceptions which aren’t trypically relevant to this conversation), and bits of information don’t relate to each other spatially (concepts don’t exist below or beside or to the west of one another). Call me Whorfian, but how we talk affects what we do. If our talk is wrong, our work will be too.”

Andrew Dillon, in the “Wayfinding and Navigation in Digital Spaces” panel, presented something [powerpoint, 60k] that opened my head up like a can of anchovies, and rearranged a good few things in there. From Dorelle Rabinowitz’ notes on the panel, at B&A comes the memebullet, for which I stop only short of using the blink tag to emphasise:

“We talk about navigating when we mean understanding.”

This is resonating so powerfully for me that my teeth are on edge. I’ve had several rather painful conversations at work in the last couple of weeks about “navigation systems”. We have “cross-platform global navigation” projects, “navigation standards” – invoking the mysterious power of ‘consistency’ the tyrannical L-shaped shadow of the ubiquitous navigational menu looms large over me. I’m starting to experience NaviHate.

I mentioned I’d pursued spatial/urban metaphors in proposing wayfinding systems. I did a bunch of work when I first rejoined the BBC based upon Kevin Lynch’s 1963 “The Image of the City”, and how the sprawl of www.bbc.co.uk might become a more “imageable” datapolis.

Lynch’s work enables me to reconcile the spatial and semantic approaches, precisely because it studies the semantics of urban space, and how we build our images of the city from them.

Andrew Dillion’s presentation zeroes in on this approach as well I believe, with the final slide of the presentation presenting the diagram of a “semantic spatial model” wherein we process our experiences into a shape, a space built of semantic meaning. That great navigational driver of “consistency” does not necessarily support this, rather it is coherence and comprehension; a narrative that can be easily internalised, that is the goal.

Wayfinding structure, language and narrative build this: rich understanding built of many storyshapes bourne on, and of a rulespace – a physics that meaning, coherence can be condense out of consistently.

[Tangent, related: Matt Locke on Kevin Lynch, mnemonics, and Rachel Baker’s “platfrom” project]

I have to give a talk internally tommorrow on “findability” with the awesome Margaret Hanley, which I hope can start to explore some of this.

With a big site like the BBC’s where it is hard-enough to achieve “navigational consistency”, it might be a bit much to start getting into all this, but I think it’s vital to think critically about some of the ingrained idioms and metaphors – the final word on which I leave to Andrew Dillion:

“Metaphors are like sex. talking about them makes everyone a little uncomfortable. They all think that everyone else is ‘getting it’.

» IAslash.org: IA Summit 2003 links

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UPDATE: Butterfield was hoeing this row last year, mais oui.

Filed under: Navigation and wayfinding
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Matt Locke, inspired by Natalie Jeremijenko, looks at subverting our notions of what an intelligent agent might be:

“Constantly trying to make sense out of an incomplete picture, the private eye is an imperfect avatar, always a few clues short of the whole story. In the classic gum shoe novels of Raymond Chandler, this anti hero is always getting in the way rather than getting to the truth, getting implemented in the crime and led down dark alleys. How much more interesting are these double agents compared to the dumb shiny world of the intelligent agents? The double agent recognises that intelligence can never be perfect, and those who hold intelligence cast a malign, powerful shadow. After all, even the best, most discrete butler always keeps a few too many of his master’s secrets.”

» Test.org.uk: (DOUBLE) AGENCY

Filed under: Ubiquitous computing
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(Very) rough notes from last night’s launch of the iSociety report into “mobiles and everyday life” I haven’t had a chance to read the report properly yet but you can get it from there.

I turned up a little late and didn’t catch all of the opening remarks, and this is by no means a complete transcript. The debate didn’t really get going IMHO. It needed another hour or so, and some more aggressive chairing: could have really done with looking into the social aspects of the tech, rather than posturing on the business prospects of the telcos.

The only person representing the user experience side of things, Amy Brampton, didn’t get a fair crack of the whip at all.

My mumblings are in [square brackets] as per usual.

(more…)

Filed under: Conferences and events
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