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

Today I get a new look for BBJ/work, which will ripple through the rest of the site once I have the time. I broke one of my own rules [which are made to be broken, after all], in that I designed it, but didn’t code it myself – instead my massive thanks goes to Tom for coding up my spiffing new template for kicks, and an Alias boxset.

The design is massively influenced by Jessica Helfand and Bill Drenttel’s work, specifically the jacket design for Jessica’s book of essays on information and interaction design: “Screen”.

There are a few rough edges, and a few bugs, which will get ironed out in the next few days once I understand what’s going on. Leave bug reports or general brickbats in the comments to this post if you feel like…

Filed under: Misc.
5 Comments

Nodes. No point.

• What does place mean to the connected? [via Chris]
  
• Jeff Lash: Soft Skills for the information architect [via Christina]
  
• Morlock’s lament:

  “Somewhere, somehow, we told people that everything about computers should be easy and intuitive. That you shouldn’t have to learn anything, or read manuals. That you should be able to grasp everything in ten or fifteen minutes. What nonsense. Some things just aren’t easy. Quantum mechanics. Tensor calculus. Navajo verbs forms. Old Norse. Getting rich.” – Mark Bernstein

  I dig those cartoony introduction to quantum mechanics and old norse books however. Via Victor.
  
• Punyhumans on Nokia’s 7600 and mankind inventing the tricorder 3 centuries early, except better than those Starfleet commies:

  Punyhuman#1: “what i’ve never been able to figure out is, how come the federation never figured out how to combine their ‘tricorder’ technology with their communicators? and, apparently, they develop something called a PADD around the TNG era. that’s three separate interfaces that we’ve been able to combine into one! what gives with that? star trek is my template for tech development, and it’s starting to piss me off—we’re surpassing them in usability! my illusions are like so totally shattered.”

  Punyhuman#2: “The Federation is run by Communists. Having a tricorder factory, a PADD factory, and a communicator factory lets them keep more proles on the dole. Of course, anyone who asks too many questions gets assigned to the Enterprise and issued a red shirt.”

• Tom on
  
  • enhanced extraterristrial reality
    
  • StrangerSpace

• Alex Wright on Macromedia Central, from March this year

Sunny here. Work now.

Filed under: Misc.
No Comments

Fabio Sergio reprises some favourite themes of his after they were given a Rheingold-remix:

“We all know that most choices are not devoid of strong economical implications, and that the role of any type of currency, especially when social in nature, can make or break the hypothetical ‘freedom’ we are told to be enjoying in the western world. If everyone else will be instantly available, all the time, will it be culturally acceptable not to be? Within certain social circles is it even acceptable today? I can assure you that for most European teen-agers not having a mobile phone is akin to not having a car in the US…”

Worth a read, if you believe discussion of a culture can’t be made without discussion of it’s tools.

Bleakly, tangentially related quote of the day:

“I watch every day what you are doing as a society. While you sit by and watch your Constitution being torn away from you, you willfully eat poisoned food, buy manufactured products no one needs and turn an uncaring eye away from millions of people suffering and dying all around you. Is this the “Universal Law” you subscribe to?

Perhaps I should let you all in on a little secret. No one likes you in the future.”

From the literally fantastic Johntitor.com, which Lee pointed me too. That last line has been playing on my mind all day, and probably will for a long while…

Filed under: Ubiquitous computing
3 Comments

Delegates at the UK’s most important TV industry conference voted on scenarios for 2010 and plumped for the end of linear, time-bound TV (3 years earlier than my 2013 stories…)

[scenario] 5 Death of linear TV: Broadband internet and personal video recorders (PVRs) grow rapidly and films and sports become available online causing broadband penetration to reach 35% and undermining pay TV. PVRs in 35% of homes mean that viewers watch 40% of programmes at different times and skip the ads.

How they voted: 39% of the delegates decided that the death of linear TV was the most likely scenario”

» MediaGuardian: The end for who?

Filed under: Misc.
2 Comments

MIT Technology Review has named Martin Wattenburg (see my fanboy post here) one of it’s 2003 Top 100 innovators with the citation “Simplifies people’s electronic lives with graphical data management “.

Excellent.

Filed under: Design industry and people
No Comments

If I may be permitted a Joi-Itostyle namedrop and photo, I spent an hour this afternoon with Will from iSociety at MarksBarfield Architects. They designed the London Eye, and have a new project SkyHouse that plans to reinvent highdensity living. As well as having a wonderful, wide-ranging chat with David Marks (above) and Steve, who is their IT guru – it made me realise just how much I miss architecture…

Filed under: Architectural and urban design
No Comments

Anthony Townsend via Howard Rheingold via Thefeature.com via Gizmodo via Textually.org:

“As every person completes more tasks, communicates with more people, coordinates activities among more social networks in the same amount of time, the aggregate effect is an acceleration of the urban metabolism.”

Watched “Run Lola Run” on tv on Sunday. I’ve always thought RLR was loads of fun, and one of the great bits of city-cinema. Lots of the maguffinalia of RLR wouldn’t stand now: the boyfriend in the phonebox, running to plead with Dad, the incommunicado gangster. Made in 1998, how would it be restructured now? Around smartmobs, camphones, and information-infused cities?

My first thought is Lola broadcast-texting all her low-life mates to shake down every tramp in a two mile radius of her boyfriend’s GPS location… Maybe coaxing a few mobs into life in the city to slow down the hoodlums… Would it be nearly as much fun to watch?

RLR is a pretty short and sweet film as it is. The “accelerated urban metabolism” might mean it was all over in 15 minutes!

Filed under: Sufficiently Advanced Technology
2 Comments

Chris has just got back from Mobile HCI in Italy – more notes will follow he says, but for now he has rough notes from a ‘visions ofthe future’ panel. Example tidbit:

“Harri Kiljander (director of UI), Nokia
Content management – how do we manage, use ~1 Gb of content on a mobile?”

Blimey.

» Antimega: Mobile HCI - visions of the future

Filed under: Conferences and events
No Comments

[What is this about?]

“I come here to think.

I love this part of the city. I always have.

When I come here, this time of night, it’s perfectly quiet apart from the sweepers. Their little robot bug-eyes just see me as a warm blob and steer clear.

I’m glad. I come here to think, and relax – not quiet ready to go home yet, not quite ready to sleep.

It’s the busiest, brassiest square in the North is Big Market. But it’s quiet now.

Idly, I flip my phone open. Warm blinks researched for the right combination of friendly frequency and companionable colour tell me my friends were here earlier. I gesture my phone in the air like a wizard in a children book, and the blurred drunk pictures they took of themselves just a few hours ago appear.

I remember as a kid watching David Attenborough tell me about Africa – and how the rhinos could smell better than they saw, and so their friends and lovers appeared in their mind’s eye as week-long scent trails, reassuringly ‘there’ even when physically long past.

Here I am, with my phone, seeing the city like Rhinos see. I come here to think.”

GPS, digital cameras and phones will combine to let people annotate the places around them – fixing pictures and information in space and time, and sharing that specific instance of experience with their friends.

Filed under: Sufficiently Advanced Technology
3 Comments

[What is this about?]

“I suppose the most useful thing the cat does is bring me my pills when I need them. There’s so many of them it’s a wonder I don’t rattle. She remembers them all though and jumps up onto the arm of the chair and gives me a poke with it’s little metal nose to tell me it’s time. Doesn’t spill anything off it’s little tray – it’s a wonder!

That’s the most useful thing, dear – but my favourite thing is when it reads me the email from my grandchildren, and shows me the pictures on the telly. That’s marvellous that is.

I can reply too, and I felt a bit daft doing that at first – Henry laughed at me. But I said, you used to talk to our old cat – the real one, all the blooming time, so don’t you give me that Henry Jacobs!

We’re getting a dog next. Dogs are a little more expensive apparently, but a lot stronger and can do more around the house. Mrs Eldred around the corner is infirm and has a monkey, which can lift her in and out of bed in the morning, but that’s just daft – who’d want a robot monkey in the house?”

Technology leaders in the far-east are investing heavily into domestic robotics, both for ‘companions’, and human-augmentation, expecting them to become mainstream markets in 10 – 15 years. Sony has adopted the AIBO dog as its corporate mascot, and see robotics as an ‘entertainment and information delivery platform”

As well as companionship for the greater numbers of people living along, there are applications in catering for an aging population in the western world. From Wired:

‘In one scenario, patients with early stage Alzheimer’s might receive prompts from the system when they pause for an extended period while making tea. Reminders to eat, drink and take medicine could be sent through a radio or television.’, ‘Dishman said society has no choice but to aggressively develop such technology as 76 million baby boomers begin to turn 65 in 2011.’

Also from Wired:

“Nursebot , a robot that provides both cognitive and motor support to seniors. Nursing-home residents can lean on Nursebot as the machine walks them down long corridors, responds to their questions and reminds them about appointments.”

“when a robotic kitten named Max arrived, he seemed to melt the hearts of a few robot skeptics. Max, which was built by Omron out of Tokyo, is quite lifelike, with sensors that trigger catlike responses—including 48 different cat sounds—with a touch or voice cue. Omron only built 500 Maxes last year, according to Elena Libin, project director at the Institute of Robotic Psychology and Robotherapy in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

The institute studies “robotherapy,” which its website defines as the use of person-to-person interactions “to create new positive experiences.” Libin is studying the mood-altering effects Max has on seniors with dementia.”

Filed under: Sufficiently Advanced Technology
No Comments

[What is this about?]

“In our more whimsical moments, we thought about giving our new arrival a name that would rhyme with her phone number. Magda pointed out quite sensibly (Magda is quite sensible) that this was a bad idea, and the Government leaflets about the phone number pointed out it was a bad idea.

So little Marta came into the world named and numbered. They gave us the SIM card had the hospital and explained that we could keep it slotted in the TV box until she was old enough to get a mobile.

Our box is a little old and doesn’t have the right slots I think but a groggy Magda prompted the nurse who deals with the SIMs to tell me about how we can get money back from the government if we get a new one.

It’s worth doing – as it gives details of Marta’s progress to the hospital and they can tell us when to come in for checks and injections etc., to the TV, and our phones. Magda says I’m one of those phone hypochondriacs she read about, always checking my NHS stats and rushing to the health food shop based on the recommendations. She reckons that Marta’s stats will have me running around in circles! I don’t care. The SIM lets me see my baby grow up everyday, and that’s worth it.”

Government branding us with a unique identity from birth has long been the stuff of dystopian nightmare. However, most of us volunteer for a unique identity when we sign up for a personal, mobile telephone number. It is not far-fetched then perhaps to see the government trying to get the benefits to them of introducing compulsory ID through the convenience to us of the single mobile phone number from birth.

Filed under: Sufficiently Advanced Technology
2 Comments

[What is this about?]

“Christina runs ChannelZero. One of the girls in another school tried to start a channel in the summer, but pretty soon they all started watching Christina’s, so she ended up looking pretty stupid. She’s still flaming ‘Stina which is pretty pathetic.

‘Stina lets me do some of the scheduling sometimes when I’m round at hers, and some of the other girls help out – looking after the boards and kicking ppl who don’t share, or share something for everyone to watch at same time, which is like the most childish thing you can do. It takes ages to get something if lots of people aren’t sharing.

‘Stina got a token last year, which means she gets fresh stuff from Australia and America before anyone we know. One of the older boys in school has a token too, but his lot just get geeky stuff. All spaceships and aliens – long boring stuff with episodes that are hours long. My Dad has the token for our family, and he’s got mostly his football mates running his channel, he gives me some megs for videos sometimes.

ChannelZero is pretty standard I guess – it’s videos with the latest 10 minute episodes of East, Lovebomb and Vamps in between, but we stick our own stuff in there – like a lot of kids I suppose. Remixes and shoutouts and stuff. There’s usually about half-an-hour of ppl’s camblogs and stuff after each episode cos we want to talk about the clothes and stunts in Vamps or something. We get enough from the ads to buy more vids and clothes and stuff, if we do really well we split it with the group.

It’s exams next year so we probably won’t be able to keep it going, but ‘Stina said shes had a couple of bids for it already, and says she could probably get enough for a holiday or a new moby, so I reckon she’ll sell it.”

Social pressures to watch the latest seasons of Charmed, Buffy and Angel combine with file-sharing apps such as Kazaa to mean that many 15-24 year olds have watched entire seasons from the US on their PCs or Burned VCDs before they are shown on satellite pay TV or the much later free-to-air.

Music request stations such as The Box, Kerrang TV etc are dominated by fanmobs dictating programming via SMS and webvotes.

Microsoft’s 3degrees application aims to combine shared media context – mp3 jukebox shared between 10 friends and chat.

A “Social Scheduling” scenario as shown above could see p2p filesharing apps such as Bittorrent (which increases in efficiency with each concurrent user) thrive in the creation of ultralocal, and/or ultratribal media channels.

Filed under: Sufficiently Advanced Technology
3 Comments

Okay… I got asked by someone in the BBC to write some stories, storylets actually – about digital technology and our lives in 2013. I’ve dashed off eight over the weekend, and had ideas for four more.

And as an outboard-thought-experiment, I’m going to publish four here; in the hope that anyone who reads them can improve on them, spin off some interesting tangents on them, or just fact-check my posterior as I wasn’t particularly rigourous or scientific about the trends or tech they build on.

So comments, or trackbacked extensions on the storylets most, most welcome.

After all, if the four storylets here end up more valuable to the BBC as a result of putting them up here, then that’s a valuable storylet in itself…

• 2013: “10 Minute TV”
  
• 2013: “Birth SIMtificate”
  
• 2013: “Superpets last all autumn long”
  
• 2013: “Like Rhinos see”

Filed under: Sufficiently Advanced Technology
7 Comments

MattW’s just gone public with a project he’s working on called “Glancing”. From his project notes:

“The analogy I’m thinking of here is a group of people sitting working at their computers. Every so often, you look up and look around you, sometimes to rest your eyes, and other times to check people are still there. Sometimes you catch an eye, sometimes not. Sometimes it triggers a conversation. But it bonds you into a group experience, without speaking.

Would it be possible to build software like this? That’s what Glancing is intended to do (there are more implicit assumptions in this): To model a group of people online who occassionally glance at each other, which is a small social transaction. This is done using a group model which stores the glance state: High if people have been glancing recently, low otherwise.”

It’s an interesting way to look at what some social software could be. Not a system that encompasses of facilitates all interactions of a group, but something that builds the necessary starting conditions for those interactions. The fertile substrate or “loam” as we matt(s) are fond of calling it.

MMORPGs seem to be advancing this ‘ecological’ model of social interactions through quite different, connected apps/systems: The GameNeverEnding particularly. Something like Glancing would fit right in with persistent worlds – maintaining loose, low-effort connections to the people in those other places while you are working on your desktop…

Anyway – take a look at MattW’s Glancing Notes at see what you think:

» Interconnected: Glancing Notes

Filed under: Social Software
No Comments

Spam lives.

It’s become a versatile, adaptive network-scale beast.

Bayesian filtering – the most effective tool I have to stop spam getting through is mostly working, but the Spam Demiurge is feeling it’s way around, in blind-but-rapid evolutionary cycles, to find the gaps. I’m starting to think, once you get beyond the inconvenience, The Blind Spammaker is starting to create beauty*.

I got a spam tonight, for ‘gentlemanly enhancements’ (what else?) with the subject line:

“Subject: canon eigenspace polaris”

I think that there’s going to be a growing convergence between spam subject lines and the names of Culture Ships…

Filed under: Sufficiently Advanced Technology
1 Comment

...of finding out that someone you really like the thoughts of has a blog – which after all is just a way to know their thought and perhaps have a conversation around them at a difference.

John Harris has a blog called VirtualTravelog. John was/is an ex-mining engineer, ex-pat Yorkshireman who was a director of technology at Sapient in San Francisco when I worked for them. When I was in SF we’d go for a warm beer and have a really excellent wide-ranging talk about tech, society, ecology, engineering and whatever else the beer or surroundings inspired.

Look like his blog is going to be much the same. His latest post at time of writing is on “Economics and the Internet’s Large-Scale Topology” which seems to build on some of the work I was involved with in a very small way with him at Sapient.

Top stuff and one to subscribe to.

Filed under: Blog watch
1 Comment

Outboard brainfood:

• Damn, this looks good: The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds
  
  
• LUMEN event in Leeds includes: ‘Liquid Modernity’, a conversation between radical sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and entropy artist Gustav Metzger.
  
• NewScientist: “smart software to animate sketches”: ‘With our software, the ‘causes’ are what the user had in mind to draw, and the ‘effects’ are what was actually drawn’
  
• SkyHouse
  
• John Harris: “Big fish tend to be less common than the little fish they eat”
  
• OrangeCone#1: “Ubiquitous communication technology is recreating interpersonal relationships that existed before transportation technology and growing populations caused human contact to become much more attenuated.”
  
• Orangecone#2: Economics (?!?) of McBandwidth
  

Filed under: Misc.
No Comments

Architecture has, throughout history, encoded manners, customs and law into physical space. Now it extends its influence into the digital.

“Icebergs Systems is beta-testing Safe Haven, a combination of hardware transmitters and a small piece of control software that is loaded into a camera phone handset. When the handset is taken into a room or building containing the Safe Haven hardware, the phone is instructed to deactivate the imaging systems. The systems are reactivated as soon as the handset is out of range.”

&#187 Picturephoning.com: ‘Safe’ zones blocks picture phones

Filed under: Ubiquitous computing
2 Comments

Interesting, honest and dogma-free discussion of breadcrumb trails in website design at Asterisk [via guyweb].

Upsum seems to be “as a designer I always put them in, but as a user I never use them”. Research and testing of breadcrumb-style solutions I’ve done supports this – they tend to reassure users rather than be a crucial part of the interface. It is a crumb: a tiny part of the picture people form of where their are in the structure of a site, and where it’s possible to go next.

IMHO, If you don’t have a highly-structured service, or screen-space is at a premium, there may be better ways to spend your effort and pixels in the service of users.

Had interesting comments in user tests along the lines of “Well, it’s something that all proper websites have, but I don’t really know what it’s for”. On iCan we’re tryng to give people lots of these crumbs with which to make their own way with what best suits them.

There’s a primary ‘location’ cue: a fairly traditional ‘vertical-slice’ hierarchical breadcrumb trail, prominent “see also” links which display a ‘horizontal-slice’ across the service, and at the bottom of each page, a ‘last things you looked at’ pot of links. This aims to support “The Cycle” hypertext pattern, allowing people to flip back and forth through a self-reinforcing trail of oft-visited links.

Filed under: Navigation and wayfinding
1 Comment

Jump London on Channel 4 tonight was full of spectacular moments, but not the spectacular moments the filmmakers had hoped, I thought.

The format was – introduce “Le Parkour” or freerunning, with a brief history, then buildup to a set of freerunning pieces across major London monuments.

The potted history of Le Parkour was good – best I’ve seen in a mainstream programme, starting from the schooldays of one of the originators of the sport, Sebastien Foucan. The buildup was pretty drawn-out with mock tension over whether or not stuffy old London building managers would let maniac Frenchmen run all over their Grade-One listed heaps.

Then the runs were shown. The more classical ‘monuments’ like The Royal Albert Hall, County Hall and The Mall were actually pretty dull. Not to knock les superheroics francais, but freerunning just doesn’t work on buildings of classical scale it seems – not enough nooks and crannies, ramps, and articulation of form to waltz with it seems.

The trio of parkouristes were at their best in the close quarters, dense backalleys of Bankside and fractal flatroofs of Wardour St, Soho. And at their most spectacular on the gun turrets and gunwales of HMS Belfast and the brutalist concrete crevices of The National Theatre.

A number of pundits were put up to speculate briefly on the potential phenomenon, including Wills Alsop and Hutton, Skateboarding & The City academic Iain Borden and, weirdly, The Pet Shop Boys.

The best bit for me was a little 2 minute sequence in the buildup to the run, where you saw the guys fresh from France, having to familiarise themselves with the feel of a new city.

They had to handle it, touch and examine it. Jack Hawksmoor for real. You saw them adjusting to the slightly different rhythms and gaits of London – brick courses just a little different, past layers of Imperial measure intersposed with more modern metric, bollards at slightly different spacings and heights.

The careful, deliberate and delicate sizing up of a new lover. Fantastic.

Here’s a link to the UK’s own UrbanFreeflow - a good place to start if you want to get into Le Parkour/Freerunning

More screengrabs below in the extended entry…

(more…)

Filed under: Games and play
3 Comments