The Etech ‘09 call for proposals/papers has been out for a week or so, and it’s theme/focus is “Living, Reinvented: The Tech of Abundance and Constraints”, which makes me doubly-excited to be participating this year on the program committee along with some y’know, actual smart people: Mike Walsh, Annalee Newitz, Natalie Jeremijenko, Matt Webb, Nat Torkington, David Pescovitz, Timo Hannay and Kati London.
The full CFP can be found here, and some of the themes I’ll be particularly looking forward to seeing the proposals for are:
City Tech: Our cities are growing, getting bigger faster than ever before. People are rushing to them in search of economic and social opportunity?jobs, urban living, and access to culture. How can technology help us create livable, prosperous, sustainable cities? What should mass transit look like? How can we infuse urban infrastructure with sustainability? How are cities using citizens? data to become smarter? What can economics tell us about the way urban populations will change and behave?
Materials & Mechanics: Mechanics and materials develop hand-in-hand. The creation of a new, lighter metal enables iPhones and Mars Explorers. We?ll examine the latest in mechanics and the materials that enable new developments. What mechanisms will be possible? How will the coming age of materials change our clothes, our products, and our everyday lives? Can they be made the cradle2cradle way or will we simply be clogging our landfills with ingenious, meticulously crafted waste?
Mobile & The Web: The next billion people will come to the Web via connected mobile devices. Currently, many of these devices are humble dumb clients, but the iPhone, Google, and Nokia are bringing smarter clients to the masses with open platforms. How will these mini-computers change our lives? How will these jumbo-sized sensors benefit us? Will we be able to use the third screen to view an augmented world? What data will be collected and who will have access to it? Is the Web ready for the Next Billion? What will their web apps look like?
I have a feeling the key to this is going to be a distributed, active hunt in territories unfamiliar – so if you have a friend who’s a grad student doing weird things in a lab somewhere, and architect or an engineer sketching strange bio-mimetic structures on pub beer-mats; or anyone outside of the usual O’Reillysphere that you know who’s doing something exciting, do encourage them to take a look at the CfP.
It was a presentation by Tom Coates and myself on an area that fascinates us both – the coming age of practical ubicomp/spimes/everyware.
Although hopefully grounded in some of the design ideas explored in our respective current projects, it was a whistlestop tour around the ideas and conversations of many.
I’m finally getting around to put some of the talks I gave last month in San Francisco online – the first of which being a talk I gave at Adaptive Path’s MX conference entitled: Battle For The Planet Of The Apes. Unfortuntely, slideshare seems to have eaten a few images, but I’ll try and correct that in coming days.
Brandon and Henning of AP had asked me to give a perspective on social networks and some of the design decision’s we’d taken on Dopplr – it ended up a bit more of a tongue-in-cheek critique of some of the prevailing idioms in the current YASNS boom and an appeal to step back to a broader view of social software…
Thanks to AP for the invite, and for the attendees of MX for their attention!
Next week is mainly going to be the scary prospect of me speaking my brains at the West Coast until they’re sick of it.
First up, on Tuesday, I’m closing-out the Adaptive Path MX conference in a double-feature with Scott Hirsch. I’m hoping everyone will dig the short rock opera about social software we’ve come up with.
Tom’s been fascinated by this area for a long time I know, and the launch of FireEagle has added practical experience of creating services within the domain, so he’s really going to strap rocket-boosters to the session.
Jen Pahlka of Web2.0Expo asked me some questions about the talk/discussion that give some more flavour of what territory we’re going to try and cover. It’s going to be grounded in work on Dopplr and FireEagle, but hoping the discussion will wander off into questions of near-future EveryWare.
But, hopefully after a restorative burrito, I’ll have the energy for one last gig at SF IxDA, where I’ll be talking about the Howies Machine amongst other things referencing my old favourite theme of design and play.
A full week! Hopefully see you somewhere along the way.
Of course, this was meant to be something punchy, level-headed and action-packed as a promotion for their upcoming MX event, where people want to hear about the business-like practicalities and opportunities of ‘design thinking’ etc.
Instead they got something that Peter accurately described as ‘DVD-extras’, and I’m pretty comfortable with that.
For me, at least, and YMMV of course – crispy, crunchy blue-shirt and chinos bullet-points don’t do it. Design, invention and making comes out of play, punning and rambling on – generative, diverging and looping and splicing.
I’m very glad that Ryan decided to do the interview in IM, rather than emailing me questions that I could respond to as if in an exam. It’s a fun mess, that I’m glad to say Peter returned to and found a seed of something to advance further himself: the influence that our new ability of visualising shared behaviours has on our old ability as a social species to flock.
I’m hoping that my talk at MX will have a little more discipline to it, but still have enough DVD extras there for people to pick out and run with. If you register for MX, then use the discount code AP have given me: “MXMJ”, you’ll get 15% off the
registration price…
Shirky vs eno: raw notes, usual disclaimers apply – not a transcript by any means.
ICA
Monday 17th march, 7pm
Eno: Emergence of social communities through networks
1988 : joined the well
Felt like a fulfilment of mcluhan idea of the global village
Persistent on a mixture of honour and shame – which is what keeps small communities together.
93-95 internet had started to grow and it was obvious it wasn?t a 60s social experiment.
Large scale online games: not idealistic global villages -they need different sorts of tools and rules to run successfully. Not anarchistic or simplistic – but nothing like business as usual.
What is the difference between a trad business like ford cars and wikipedia?
Clay: The biggest difference is that large actions generally entail large transaction costs. Scale of decisions pushes you to add some kind of structure. Till recently this was always certainly hierarchically. Internet and social tools reduce coord costs so radically that groups can form and disband easily, but still produce action. Contribution of individuals can be lightweight and distributed.
Most people do almost nothing, and a very few people do an awful lot. Power law. The value of those minimal contributions, can be aggregated to a great effect.
The search for how to structure very large networks that are building value (e.g. Wikipedia, linux) that we are living through is the experimental wing of political philosophy.
Eno: We are poorly informed by our current news media structures (cf. Nick Davies book) PR culture means opinion is careful moulded by power and distributed by a hungry and resource-starved mainstream rolling news media.
Other sources of opinion are needed – the networks.
There?s a phrase of yours I like: ?replacing planning with co-ordination?
Clay: When ever you get a mobile phone you replace plans with co-ordination. What this does for p2p comms is now coming to groups. Great example: HSBC protests on facebook (clay mentioned this on STW)
Eno: a lot of the book is about how a quantitative change becomes a qualitative change. Enabled new situations to catalyse.
Clay: what?s changed is not the tools. Society doesn?t change because of tools, but when attitudes and behaviours change. The tools plus increased social density and comfort – means early adopter techniques have become mainstream social behaviour. The public can now take the sort of actions that they were locked out of just a few years before.
Eno: we?re in England and so we?re pretty cynical compared to people from the west coast. Coming from the most surveilled society in the western world. Can?t believe that governments are going tolerate these changes in power balance that online communities create.
If the co-ordination is mostly through the internet- it?s inconceivable to me that governments are not spending billions on figuring out how to control this. Doesn?t this co-ordination online make us vulnerable?
Clay: Well – I?m not from the west coast I?m from NYC, so my levels of cynicism is somewhere between Mountain View and Brixton.
Yours is a nightmarish scenario, but the thing holding it at bay is that the internet is the first thing that merits the name ?media? because it is genuinely general purpose and flexible. The choice that governments have therefore is connect or disconnect. Too much of what the government is doing is on the same network. The danger is that certain wealthy and controlling regimes will perfect some kind of point control to remove undesirable information from the public sphere before there is casual awareness (cf. The chinese firewall)
(Starts ref: the Leipzig / Minsk ice-cream protest story from ?here comes everybody? – information cascades)
SxSW is over for another year, and I’m still recovering from seemingly having eaten the Cloverfield monster, BBQ’d and served with yellow sauce.
I was down to give one talk about ‘supercolliders’ – people who are maestros of social networks, and tried to keep it from being a Dopplr sales pitch as much as possible, but talked about some of the philosophical underpinnings of why we’d chosen some of the directions we had in the design.
“[maybe we’re talking about] two types of social apps: The first class being services where the distribution of information is informed by pre-defined relationships – you receive photos I uploaded because we had previously declared each other as friends. And the second class of services are ones where the flow of information is what defines relationships – we are friends because we regularly send each other photos we?ve uploaded. The general consensus of the panelists was that the first, more ?traditional?, model is proving increasingly ill-suited to support the activities of these extra-social, collision-prone users.”
Then I got drafted onto a panel about international cultures of mobile device usage. It was something I had to come at on the hoof, but the conversation flowed pretty freely. However I’m sure that both myself and the audience we wishing I was Jan Chipchase or Younghee...
As per usual I managed to miss nearly everything that people said was interesting, including the Steven Johnson / Henry Jenkins and Jane McGonigal keynotes (although I suspect the latter would have been choir-preachin’) – anyway – Dan Hon has awesome notes of eveything I wanted to see.
But – one thing that I think was an interesting trend were the ‘fringe’ mini-conferences that sprang up.
For instance a semi-private one that saw moo, etsy and threadless getting together to share plans and pain; and another open one put on by getsatisfaction for users of their software. Dopplr is starting to really use getsatisfaction more fully for support and product development so this was extremely useful (and great fun)
Nice to see that when the caravanserai hits town, some people are ready to make great, novel uses of it.
On my way to Austin for SxSW. I got drafted by Souris, and very excited to be on a panel with her, Jen Bekman, and Ben Cerveny.
Souris and Jen as networking-ninjas will be relating their experience of engaging in social networks for fun and profit, while Ben and myself will be talking about social tools and how ‘supercolliders’ hack and transform them.
Looking forward to it.
Best of all, Silvio crafted these magnificent Mii’s for all of us!
Saw Seymour Powell speak this afternoon. Basically, they gave a great presentation of ideas that aren’t that foreign to anyone practising interaction or product design, but as such still depressingly exotic to marketing, advertising and brand people… And let’s face it – you kind of automatically win if you end with “and here’s the spaceship we designed”...
in a very grand ballroom…
let?s just say that advertising people do their conferences very differently…
masterclass – from seymourpowell
intro by chris thomas -theme of conference is ?ideas with consequence?
design effectiveness
design council study – basket of companies that privilege design outperforms FTSE
effective design – is there any other kind?
it?s not art
david sainsbury – innovation = successful exploitation of new ideas.
brand – a series of promises that do not change over time (bernstein)
Voyage of the dawntreader – what is a star – - what it is, not what it?s made of.
Aston Martin example – ?power, beauty, soul?
?they?ve made a dreadful mistake but putting it on the dashboard.. I don’t want to be told!? (show, don’t tell)
?you don?t own it, it lives in the heart of the consumer?
brands taken and refracted and distorted by forces outside the brand
communications are become more and more fragmented
the product is where the brand keeps it?s promises – where the rubber hits the road.
?audi tt doesn’t need an ad – it is the ad? -john hegarty
the product is an ad that runs every time you pick it up.
even at the end of it?s life – when you discard it.
the brand can be redefined by the product (for good or for ill)
skoda – 10 years refining the product to redefine the brand.
is land-rover a brand or a product?
the dna of the brand is the vehicle, the product
design as a job of reasserting authority for a brand.
brands are far to important to entrust to brand managers
1.7 years is the average tenure of a brand manager
product cycles are typically 2-8years…
emotional ergonomics – you love to use it.
3d dimensional brands
phases of creativity: idea >belief > embodiment
old saw: ?a brief is a collection of the client?s prejudices? is true.
we don?t listen – we watch.
if you listen to focus groups you get post-rationlisation, not insight.
emergent behaviour comes from watching, and if you watch that you find the future.
if 72% of consumer decisions are made at point of sales then how come 72% of the budget isn’t spent there?
change.
?unless we build a receiver into the client, they can?t be read for the violence of the new?
push/pull activity – push from tech, pull from marketing.
poor comms between both usually.
over-ambition can be the death of innovation – the search for the big idea, the category killer
usually great innovation is more about a series of small ideas brought together in a new and orginal way
often innovation theory triumphs over practice – management goobledegook and voodoo. buzzword bingo.
embodying it doesn’t usually fall to the innovation consultants…
innovation sheep-dip – flawed but p.c. idea that everyone can be creative. some people are just more creative than others…. training isn?t always the answer.
good design is cheap, brilliant design is free.
process: gets you the unexpected but relevant solution
?crucible? events – melting point for alloying the points of view of marketing and technical.
embodying an idea is so important – sketching and drawing is crucial.
redesigning the steam iron for tefal
two small headaches from user observation – why do I have to fill it through a tiny hole, why is it always falling off
c.f. shelf-demonstrable
stand somewhere else to solve the problem from where you are used to – to get to the unexpected but relevant solution
new paradigms of product – how do you create them?
when we see something we don?t quite understand – your brain rifles through all the categories it knows and tries to find a match
businesses need to be a zoom lens to see the very small things that might disrupt the vision.
occupy yourself with the parts without losing sight of the whole.
businesses should ask ?why not? more than ?why?
– george bernard shaw quote
?how far do you want to dream?
shows virgin galactic video
they give extremely good talk – the confidence and passion is something to behold…
Went to the as-per-usual-hectic opening last night and was knocked out to see such resolved and beautifully communicated work from everyone on the Design Interactions course.
In the past, the interim show work has struggled to make intangible and challenging concepts engaging – not this time.
Playful, clear and concrete stuff – well done all involved.
I’ve got a couple of speaking gigs coming up in the new year, and I’m getting down to thinking beyond the proposals I made for them, to what I’m actually going to, y’know, say.
I’ve spoken at conferences in the past, but the difference this time, which I’ve not experienced before is that I’m not speaking on behalf of anyone other than the company I co-founded.
It’s fast coming up on Dopplr’s first birthday (I think MattB wrote the first lines of code at year ago tomorrow) and now it’s been getting a little bit of attention and serious usage, I’ve been taking a little bit of time to step back and look at the faults, the lessons and the next things to fix, improve, change.
Over new year in Tokyo with Boris we couldn’t help but discuss some of the design problems we’ve got and came up with what (at least, wandering around in the sunshine and cold, and far away from a computer screen, or even a whiteboard) seemed like nice solutions.
The stuff I think I’ve learned in the first year of doing Dopplr is going to be the core of my first talk at IxDA08 in Savannah in February, although as it’s going to be an expert audience, I’m also hoping to go into some more abstract territory that Boris, MattB, Tom and myself sometimes head into when we’re chatting over a Greggs Tea in the office.
I’m very excited about the event itself, which is the inaugural get-together for iXDA, with some awesome keynotes – but also to expose what I’ve been doing with Dopplr to probably the toughest audience I could dream of.
There?s an explosion in what?s been called ?personal informatics?: services that surface information about you and your network to your advantage. I?ll examine how great UX design can maximise the benefits to all.
Primarily reviewing design decisions from the development of Dopplr.com, I?ll also draw on many other applications, devices and services from the cutting edge of personal informatics, to identify patterns and principles that work for power-users and newbies alike.
Privacy is often, quite rightly, the first concern of users, designers and developers ? but I?ll argue that some other ?P?s: Pertinence, Politeness and, yes? Prettiness are equally important for the adoption and success of such services.
The multi-disciplinary nature of creating great user experiences is taken to extremes in the nascent area of ?personal informatics? and I?ll touch on information visualisation, user-centred service-design, copywriting, geo-location, wayfinding, design for mobile, ubiquitous computing, video-games, ?spimes?, industrial design and even urban planning before we?re done.
Web2.0Expo’s audience I have no idea about, but I’m guessing it’s more oriented towards business people and developers / technical managers.
As you can guess from the blurb, I’m going to try and connect some of the stuff we’re doing with Dopplr to some of my favourite themes of the last few years, and stuff that I think is going on around the area more generally, including work by people like Tom, Adam and the Stamens.
I’m not sure it’s strictly “web2.0” but it’s what’s most exciting to me at the moment, so thanks to the organisers for feeling the same way! Currently, I’m ‘sole billing’, but I’m hoping to get some guest stars roped into the discussion.
I thought I’d write down what I want to do in order to make myself do it, and perhaps invite some wit and wisdom to inject also.
Curated in-part at least by Dan Saffer (who is probably the world’s best cello-playing interaction designer) Interaction 08 [upcoming.org entry] has a truly fantastic line-up of pundits, practitioners and provocateurs from the field of digital/physical interaction design, including Bill Buxton, Alan Cooper and Malcolm McCullough keynoting.
Dan was kind enough to invite me to speak, and I’m in equal part excited and terrified to be doing so in such company – and to what will probably be one of the most clued-up group of people you could put ideas in front of.
My favourites – ClimbActic (Teaser Trailer above) and H20 will be on show, and you can also download them from the Dare to be Digital website, if you register.
Went to the second (my first) This Happened event on Tuesday 2nd October at Rich Mix, in East London.
They filled a much bigger venue than the first one (a room above the Griffin pub) with both London’s interaction/product design crossover-crowd, and some visiting luminaries as a result of the FOWA halo-effect.
What I walked away from the event from though was the possible connection between the last three talks.
Not sure if this was deliberate on the part of the curators, but Dee Halligan’s talk on developing The Science of Spying exhibition (something I’ve had an insider view of through Foe’s work on that, and probably the best overview of it online is by Regine) connected with Rory Hamilton’s presentation of the service design interventions Live|Work staged in The Baltic gallery, and Massimo Banzi’s guided tour of the Arduino sketching-in-hardware revolution dovetailed nicely to me.
That is – centred around Rory’s lovely tales of getting the staff of the Baltic to re-engineer their environment (the ‘service safari’ he took them on was wonderful – especially the way he hacked a special cover full of guidance and prompts for disposable cameras to take with them) and the service they provide through rapid prototyping (I really loved his phrase: “Creating service-envy”), and thinking about Science Of’s need to create many interactive installations in one environment – wouldn’t there be a great application there of ‘sketching in hardware’ in rapidly developing fun and playful things for public spaces, that visitors could perhaps even participate in, for Arduino?
Nico mailed me about what sounds like an excellent gathering in October: Intersections 07
“The conference chair is Jeremy Myerson, and sessions that have caught my attention include:
—‘The challenges of design thinking’ with Tim Brown—‘Mission creep – The limits of design’ with James Woudhuysen—‘What is the new know-how in service design?’—‘From job to jobs: the rise of the polymath’ with Richard Seymour—‘The design toolbox for life experiences’ with Clive Grinyer—‘The social anthropology of design’ chaired by Deyan Sudjic with Richard Seymour, Peter Saville and John Thackara”
Nico himself is chairing a thread which sounds up-the-collective-streets of a lot of people I know:
The seminar sessions in my thread are ‘Designing interactions, media or experiences?’ with Daljit Singh of Digit London, Durrell Bishop of Lucky Bite, and Andy Altmann of Why Not Associates, and we will be asking ‘What do designers from different backgrounds and who are designing interactions to different ends, consider to be their core skills?’; and ‘Can good design be ‘co-created’?’ with Future Cities Project director Austin Williams and Joe Heapy of Engine, and we will be asking ‘What has design got to learn from the open-source software movement and ‘wiki-nomics’? and ‘While everyone is a designer, isn’t it the job of professional designers to champion good design?’.
I mailed Nico back (somewhat hastily) about the event, saying that it that occured to me is that it’s quite an “old school” event in some ways, compared to the emerging ‘unconference’ status quo in the tech world – i.e. It’s going to be established, well-known, vocal clever people on stage talking to (probably, mostly less-established) clever
people in the audience.
I wondered whether there might be opportunity for a fringe of ‘pecha-kucha’/’ignite‘-style open mic stuff?
I wonder if it might be possible to find a friendly bar in Newcastle/Gateshead to do a design barcamp? Perhaps along the lines of the “This Happened” night that was in London a little while ago?
Although – creating a Foo/BarCamp for designers might be a thankless task!
On second thoughts perhaps it would be nice to just sit, laptops shut, minds-open and listen to clever people in the nice surroundings of the Baltic Mills.
“There will be a diverse mentor network of serial entrepreneurs, corporates, venture capitalists, recruiters, marketing specialists, lawyers and accountants that will help the selected teams put together the foundations of a viable business.”
How about designers?
Technology plays alone are starting to lose their distinctiveness in many of the more-crowded areas of the marketplace.
Great service and interaction design are on the rise as strategic differentiators for products as diverse as the iPhone and Facebook.
Bruce Nussbaum in BusinessWeek:
“Innovation is no longer just about new technology per se. It is about new models of organization. Design is no longer just about form anymore but is a method of thinking that can let you to see around corners. And the high tech breakthroughs that do count today are not about speed and performance but about collaboration, conversation and co-creation. Thatâs what Web 2.0 is all about.”
Not sure I agree about CEOs breaking out OmniGraffle, but what about entrepreneurs?
I wonder how many Seedcamp teams will have a interaction designer on board, as part of the core – or even a designer as the lead entrepreneur?
Are they going to bake great design in from the get-go, or put lipstick on their baby gorillas?
I think it will be the former.
If there’s one Brit caricature of the entrepreneur, it’s the inventor – the engineer/designer/impressario: Baylis, Dyson, Roope!
Nussbaum’s article, in bulk is a speech he gave at the RCA, which traditionally has grown quite a few of those designer/engineer/inventor/entrepreneurs in the world of atoms.
Prof Tom Barker’s crew springs to mind, as do some of the graduates of the Design Interactions course.
The line between hackers and interaction designers is blurring as they start small businesses that are starting to make waves in the big business press.
As I mentioned, my experience of HackDay Europe was that
“It really does seem that the hacker crowd in London/Europe at least is crossing over more and more with the interaction design crowd, and a new school of developers is coming through who are starting to become excellent interaction designers – who really know their medium and have empathy with users.”
So I have high-hopes.
I’m also glad to say that the Seedcamp team are going to have user-researchers, usability experts and interaction designers in their mentor network, including me for some reason…
Nearly everything interesting on the planet seemed to be scheduled for those two days – including – Interesting2007.
Interesting was put together by Russell Davies, who is an interesting chap himself, but moreover is incredibly interested – in nearly everything. He figured that instead of spending money on going to an expensive conference he could put one on himself and not have to go anywhere – and still see as many interesting things. I think he may be on to something.
I turned up early and helped with the bunting in the Conway Hall. A fantastic setting, steeped in decades of interestingness. Alan Moore gave a performance here of what would become his wonderful magical/philosophical tract “Snakes & Ladders”, illustrated by Eddie Campbell.
On the same day, both the H.G. Wells Society and the “Community of Interbeing” were meeting there.
I’m not sure they had bunting.
The terrifyingly-high standard of talks for the day in terms of content, entertainment-value, thoughtfulness and enthusiasm was set early by log-choppers, fake-knot-historians and librarians of human happiness.
The highlight, possibly of the day, possibly of this young millennium – was Rhodri Marsden playing Wichita Lineman on a Saw…
By lunch-time I was terrified – I’d been put on to speak last. BP: Before Pub. Ben NoisyDecent who’s Design Conspiracy had made some wonderful souvernirs of the day compounded this by saying how much better he thought the 3 minute talks were than the 20 minute ones. I told him I was doing 20, and drank the half of dutch courage kindly bought for me by Jonathan Imagination.
Matthew D’Ancona’s 3 minute screed on brevity linking Orson Welles with YouTube via an uncanny Al Pacino impersonation didn’t help matters, and then the guy before me Dave FunkyPancake had the hall in stitches with a torrent of visual non-sequiters from his flickrstream.
For my part – I thought I would present things that interest me that I think are some how linked, without proscribing those links for the audience, that they might make their own.
A Rorscarch test in powerpoint format.
It was “just another future song” – only significant in that it was all the stuff that in my R&D years at Nokia I thought about a lot and talked a little bit about in various venues and now as I’m moving on from that, I thought I’d put it all together and tie a bow round it.
I went over my time. Twice over, almost – but it seemed to go down well – my slides and notes are here. I was pleased to get it out there and out of my head so it can (hopefully) fill up with the new stuff.
The best bit about the day is the old cliche that it was the people and the conversations.
It really was the people and the conversations. It felt like my “tribe” whatever that may be was in the minority – but Russell, the arch-connector mixed and mashed us with advertising and branding people, traditional design people, theorists, academics, journalists, craftspeople and it worked wondefully.
I left feeling knackered but dosed with blatant optimism.
Turned up late in the afternoon, having missed most of the action – but caught the presentations of the hacks. There is a long list on Frankie Roberto’s site, but the one’s that caught my eye were mainly geo-related
Both of Matthew Somerville’s hacks were excellent – first there was the whimsical ‘along the same lines’ which allowed you to navigate geotagged photos along lines of latitude and longitude.
Then, there was an extension of the fabulous fixmystreet.com to allow mobile posting of geotagged photos to be submitted as things to be fixed. A simple, but great example of the powerful pattern of ‘mobile-as-in-context-stubmaker’
I liked team Moo’s “net twitchr” – a playful piece of practical psychogeograp
