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

This effort of MMDC’s stood out from the scores of ‘transparent’ screen tromp l’oeil pictures created in the latest Flickr flap.

Why? The transparent terminal window floating in mid-air, mid-screen. Beautifully done.

Made me think of laptops from a possible augmented-reality future, where a vestigal frame of the screen is kept by industrial designers as a social cue, to be flipped up as an interruptions shield… even though the reality you are interacting with is just light scattered directly on your retina.

Filed under: Interface innovations
No Comments

Something about the line-up of covers on the Icon magazine website struck me.

All the moody portraits of pensive designers in immaculately-cut monochrome schmutter (ok, except for Karim Rashid, but hey…) reminded me of a talk I attended back in architecture school by Jan Kaplicky where he juxtaposed one image against another to illustrate what he thought was important about design.

It’s a method used throughout Future Systems’ published work, especially the excellent "For Inspiration Only".

First, he brought up a moody, black-and-white, Anton Corbijnesque picture of Richard Meier – black cashmere turtleneck and all; dramatically lit against horizontal window blinds. The archetypal HowardRoark pose.

Kaplicky boomed: "This is not design. This is not a designer." and flicked the slide to a sunny snap of a carpark at Boeing, full of the hundreds of people on the design team there for the 757 smiling and waving up at the camera (I think): "This is design. These are designers"

I’ve always loved that moment from Kaplicky’s talk, and subscribed wholeheartedly to the idea that the ‘great man/woman’ theory of design is bullcookies, at least for most things outside of the couture-culture of boutique graphic design, architecture or applied art celebrated by most of the design press / the Design Museum.

But – in these dawning days of ‘self-centred software’ and personal fabrication technology, could it be that Kaplicky’s Boeing carpark picture is rapidly becoming the anachronism?

As  one of the speakers at eTech on the coming fabrication revolution said (I think it was Saul Griffith), the design of objects, tools, devices, artifacts (and architecture?) is going to go through the same waves of democratisation, demystification and down-right gawdawful design as graphic design did with the advent of affordable desk-top publishing technology.

Look forward to seeing how Icon might reflect this in coming years…

Filed under: Design industry and people
4 Comments

The faceted, messy world of folk/tag/free/ethnoclassification seems to be a natural fit for zoomable user-interfaces, or ZUIs… or Zooeys*.

The latest in Flash-to-Flickr interfaces for Tag browsing by Felix Turner does a particularly nice job of using mouse-gesture, zooming layers and just good, tasteful visual design.

Here’s a grab for the tag "London" for instance:

* Zeitgeistfully, in the new film of HHG2TG, Trillian is played by a Zooey

Filed under: Interface innovations
1 Comment

Intel ethnographer Genevieve Bell was featured on BBC Radio 4’s “Sunday” Programme about the increasing infiltration of personal mobile tech into spiritual practices around the world.

» BBC Radio 4: Sunday: Mobile Phones and Spirituality [5mins 43sec, Real Audio]

Filed under: Mobile, Society and culture, Sufficiently-Advanced Lifestyle
2 Comments

One upside of being down for the count over a long weekend is that there’s no guilt in eating an entire boxed set of TV all at once.

I sat down (well, lied down) to take in Joss Whedon’s aborted cowboy space-opera, Firefly; and was pleasantly surprised.

It’s no wonder it was cancelled – it takes ages to get going, it’s got a huge cast each of whom “have a secret” and some of the best lines are in Mandarin it seems.

One thing that did strike me about a couple of episodes was how very few ‘screens’ feature in Firefly’s vision of the future – and in general how tangible and situated digital technology seems in that universe.

Filed under: Interface innovations, Tangibles, Television
1 Comment

First the server that my mail and site live on gave up the ghost, then so did I. The mail is back, but I’m still sick so apologies for even-more-tardy-than-usual-reponse-rate to email.

Filed under: Uncategorized
No Comments

A suprisingly chilled last day after the garage-hack science fair ecstasy of the Maker fair.

I need a shed, a soldering iron, a 3D printer and some flexible medical insurance, asap.

In the meantime, I’ll make stupid things with photoshop (see above)

Time to go back to Helsinki for a few hours, and then off again.

Update: some of the best, concise notes and reflections on the sessions I’ve found so far at Kareem’s site Reemer.com.

Filed under: Conferences and events
1 Comment

Like Tony, I complained a while back, and I take it all back.

I think after yesterday’s outbreaks of the future in Danny Hillis’ talk, the awesome debut of iFabricate.com, and both Neil Gershenfeld’s keynote and the panel discussion that followed – Mr. Stark would be quite happy and perhaps getting his cheque-book out.

And, y’know – if Tony’s happy, I’m happy.

Filed under: Comic Books, Conferences and events, Design industry and people, Sufficiently Advanced Technology
4 Comments

Etech05: Esther
Originally uploaded by etech.

George Dyson was amazing – but this picture is priceless – sums up the feeling of the best bits of being confronted by the future (or the past, in the case of Dyson’s presentation about computing’s founding fathers and mothers) at Etech.

Filed under: Uncategorized
No Comments

Keynote
Originally uploaded by mathowie.

Rough notes, will tidy up and URLise asap.

Filed under: Uncategorized
1 Comment

I know you’re meant to trudge around the city to tiny packed venues, but you could also just open up iTunes here…

Filed under: Conferences and events
2 Comments

Red Vs Blue folks on the post-production costs of serving content on the web:

“Imagine if the producers and distributors of Spiderman 2 got a bill from the movie theatres for increased air-conditioning because their movie was too popular”

Currently at their talk: “Why Free is a Good Price: The Terrible Business Model of Red vs. Blue” at SxSW.

Another couple of quotes:

“Homestar Runner is really a t-shirt store with a great cartoon attached”

and on bittorrent, not actually saving them costs…:

“We put bittorrent clips out there, received 45000 emails back saying ‘we don’t understand how to use this and I need to see your clip NOW!’”

Very good stuff on the way-new nanoentertainment industry from the trenches of the long tail.

Filed under: Conferences and events
1 Comment

On a flight watching “Rose”, the first episode of the new Dr. Who as rebooted by Russell T. Davies and produced by BBC Wales.

As Hammersley says – if this hasn’t been deliberately leaked by the newly bittorrent-hip Beeb to get fanpersons to blog furiously about just how good it is, then it really should have been.

I will now blog furiously (with minimal spoilage) about just how good it is.

Right from the start.

Filed under: Television
7 Comments

A March of craziness commences.

I’m going to be in Austin for SxSW Interactive from the 12th-14th. It’ll be my first time, so I have no idea what to expect or what to do. I do know I will miss the Bruce Sterling talk and his legendary party but hopefully I can peg him for 2 minutes chat on Spime-design somehow by virtue of pointing to my runner-up status in a Viridian design competition. But other than that… What do you recommend for a SxSW n00b?

I’ll get there too late for the kick-ball, but it doesn’t sound like a contact sport, therefore no fun for Welsh people. Otwell’s promised me tex-mex brex, so that’s one thing taken care of.

Then I’m off to ETech/Etcon/whatever for the 14th to the 18th March – where I’ll be acting as Chris Heathcote’s glamorous assistant for a talk on Tangible Computing – handing him RFID-enabled bunnies to saw in half, and ranting about embodied interaction – that sort of thing.

The good thing is our talk is on the first day of sessions, and early - so get to relax for the rest of what has shaped up into a rather good line-up since I slagged it off.

All apologies for that earlier apoplexy – and congrats to Rael and the team who have put together the final roster. A lot of my wishes came true (Natalie J and her feral robots, check; Neil Gershenfeld, check) -  although I still think that changing the event from an annual occurence to maybe once every two or three years would be an improvement. But now I don’t think I’ll be grumpy in the corner – much – I don’t think I have time to grow a Tony Stark ‘tache anyway.

Finally, after stopping off in Helsinki long enough to pick up some new pants and for Foe to remember what I look like, I’ll be heading to Doors of Perception 8 in Delhi with some other Nokians to get the TechnoUtopianism (© O’Reilly) smacked out of me by all and sundry.

Looking forward to some thought-provoking sessions on co-creating services and infrastructure in South-Asia from both visitors and locals that leapfrog the ‘developed world’ in both technology and sustainability.

There’s still time to get a visa and cheap flight to Delhi to join in, so the blog says.

If you’re at any one of the above ideafests, then drop a comment below, and let’s see if paths cross in the corridors.

——
p.s. yes – Fin Fang Foom is there as another tedious Iron Man reference. Sorry – but I love FFF. Bonus link – the Barbelith take on the Warren Ellis’ Tony Stark is priceless.

Filed under: Conferences and events
3 Comments

BBC News: DJ Tommy Vance dies after stroke. I remember TV as my brother’s favourite media mind gangster – 70s rock and a voice that spoke with the insistent force of ROCK, that could only be transcribed in SMALL CAPS. RIP.

Filed under: Mind Gangsters, RIP
No Comments

5 Lessons
Originally uploaded by emalone.

The wireframing power-elite are gathered in Montreal, and reading the flickr-tea-leaves leads one to believe a lot of fun and a lot of discussion of hot issues such as ‘folksonomies’ has occured.

Was also interested in what Jeff Veen posted about companies exposing support material and manuals on the web and the influence on purchasing decisions.

Not sure whether there was a lot of discussion about mobile devices.

I know from chatting at DesignEngaged that Thomas Vanderwal is obsessing on them at the moment between inventing buzzwords that get publsihed in sunday newspapers.

The IA of personal devices as they incorporate multi-gigabyte mass-storage of personal and paid-for content is a huge design challenge and opportunity.

Anyone who was there in Montreal – Is it getting any collegial thought in the IA-sphere?

Filed under: Uncategorized
3 Comments

From Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm, on the rebroadcasting of ideas:

"The cartoon phase is what happens as the ideas are repurposed to serve
the goals of actors further down the supply chain. What Paul Krugman
calls the “Policy Entrepreneurs.” Here’s a typical sentence that
illustrates how he finds this species distasteful ” am also unable to
pretend to respect ‘policy entrepreneurs’, the intellectually dishonest
self-proclaimed experts who tell politicians what they want to hear.”
These actors are no different than the rest of us; they are looking of
a place to get some positive feedback. If you frame an idea in certain
ways you get a commercially viable product. Frame it another you get a
fat book deal. Frame it another you a durable notch in the belt of your
reputation. Frame it as a open source project with sufficient
worse-is-better affordances for other people to play and you create a
bloom of activity that is really fun to watch."

But, perhaps all of those are necessary to support each other cf. Google Answers posts on Vonnegut’s "Bluebeard", which I suspect are to a question posed by Webb, who first brought the passage to my attention a few years back when arch-cartoonist Gladwell’s "The Tipping Point" was causing a fuss:

"Catching up on some reading which had gotten by me I came across a passage in Vonnegut’s Bluebeard wherein one of his characters (Slazinger) has written a book titled "The Only Way to Have a Successful Revolution in Any Field of Human Activity."  Supposedly extracted from a study of history this ‘only’ method requires a team of ‘mind openners’ to break people out of their current mindset, regardless of how unrealistic or dumb that mindset may be.

This team of ‘mind-openners’ consists of three people:

1)An Authentic Genius: a person with seemingly good ideas not in general circulation.  He adds "A genius working alone. . . is invariably ignored as a lunatic."  (copywrited in 1987)

2)A highly intelligent person in good standing in the community who will stand up and attest that the genius is not mad.

3)A person who can explain anything, to anyone."

I’m guessing from Krugman’s remarks that it’s not that often that types (1) and (3) get along, as (3) gets the big book deal…

Filed under: Society and culture
1 Comment

Filed under: Wales
No Comments

Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker on ringtones:

‘An architect in her mid-thirties said, “I spent three days of
productive work time listening to polyphonic ringtone versions of speed
metal, trying to find exactly the ringtone that expressed my
personality with enough irony and enough coolness that I could live
with it going off ten times a day. In a quiet room, in a meeting, this
phone’s gonna go off—what are they going to hear?”’

I think I must know this person.

[via the excellent 3 Quarks Daily]

Filed under: Mobile, Music, Nonsense
No Comments