Blog (page 47)

As Webb has mentioned in this week’s update, I’m leading a project in the studio called Ashdown, which is in it’s very early stages.

One of the things we need is a researcher to undertake a small sub-project for a few weeks, to help us understand the territory we’re designing for.

Have a read of the mini-brief below. It might be you!

Introducing Ashdown
Ashdown is an information system we are developing – that will manifest in a number of products relating to the UK’s educational system. Each will be built on a combination of publicly-available data sources and be made unique by the quality and insight of its presentation. The products have a variety of potential audiences: from journalists and commentators to policy-makers, teachers and parents. Each one will be gorgeous.

What do we need
We need to build up a profile of these different audiences, particularly teachers and parents – around the UK. We are looking for a researcher who can do some quick field research and create a bundle of assets that can inform the design of our products: interviews, personas, videos, relationship maps. We want someone who can provide some analysis, synthesis and have some opinions also – that we can use in our process as designers.

Who we’re looking for
Probably an individual, probably someone based near London so we can spend time together, probably someone who knows people in or related to education (getting out and finding the right people around the UK is a must), and who is happy running this piece of work themselves, for us.

When / How
We would like to have a final report and assets by the end of November 2009, and we have a £1,000 budget + reasonable expenses put aside for this.

If you’re interested yourself get in touch with me: mj [at] berglondon.com, or if you know someone who might fit the bill – please do let them know about this opportunity.We’re looking to get started as soon as we can!

I’m back. Holidays are good, I can thoroughly recommend them. And if you’re interested in the talk, Escalante, I gave while I was away, you can listen to the MP3 recording and see the bibliography.

Thanks Matt Jones for giving the week 226 and week 227 updates while I was away! He’s funnier but I talk more about business strategy. Let’s get on with the show.

Ashdown is a project to bring great user experience to UK education data. There’s a lot of it. Tom is working hard on material exploration, ingesting data sets and visualising connections and context within the data, to help designers understand and invent. I’m hoping he’ll say more about that process, from a code perspective, on this blog this week. But just now he was taking movies and chopping them into frames for some studio experiment or another, something Schulze has been working on.

Matt Jones is away today, speaking at Design by Fire in the Netherlands. I’m not kidding: he’s speaking about the nature of time. It’s possible we’ll be in a workshop together later this week, and otherwise he’s following up new business opportunities and working on Ashdown. I’m hoping he’ll get a chance to make us some more business cards and to arrange a party.

Last week Matt and Schulze were in Stockholm working with the Bonnier Group, kicking off a project that runs through to December. Bonnier are fascinating: a 150 company multinational media conglomerate with interests in radio, television, books, games and cinema, they’re also privately owned (since 1804) and able to take the long view. The R&D division – our previous and current client – works across the entire group without barriers, and is uniquely both exploratory and business savvy.

It used to be there were just a few media: telly, radio, books, phones, those kind of things. But I don’t think it makes sense to say that the Web is simply one more medium. The different services built on top of the Web have such different qualities: they are differently social; differently permanent or ephemeral; differently immersive or ambient. Flickr is a medium. YouTube is a medium. Blogs are a medium. What gave a medium its characteristics used to be the technology itself – the pipes and means of production – but with the Web that’s no longer true. What makes a medium a medium is itself up for design. The Web is not one medium, it is too fluid for that. The Web is ten thousand media, and you get to choose and invent which you use.

Schulze calls this media design and increasingly it’s what our strategy work involves. Interestingly companies up and down the media stack want the same thing. Content companies, distribution companies and technology companies are in a process of convergence. To put it bluntly: Facebook, Google, Apple, Nokia, BBC, Bonnier, the Guardian, Microsoft are becoming direct competitors, which never used to be the case.

So we’re doing media design for Bonnier, which involves strategy, invention and prototyping, and Schulze is half on that this week.

The other half of Schulze’s time is on Ojito. The manufacturing costs, timings and bill of materials are firming up, but there are a few other design and cost estimates to figure out on the route to market before we give it a GO/NO GO. If this doesn’t get in your hands via a client partnership (which is about 50% possible), this work is our pre-requisite to taking it to market ourselves.

Me, this week I’m on admin. There’s a contract to put together for a new hire, more work to be done on book-keeping, and the financial projection and work pipeline to be brought up to date. I have some invoices to chase, others to raise, and some phone calls to make. It’s incredible how much time that all takes.

I’m also working on bringing in Weminuche, and thinking hard about some challenges I see for the company on a six month timescale.

Coming back to work, I’m enormously proud of what the guys achieved while I was away. There’s been some great work completed, more brought in, and some startling opportunities developed.

But with the benefit of the distance a holiday brings, I’m aware that I’m not sufficiently able to support the right creative environment in the studio while I’m so preoccupied with admin. Matt and Schulze took me aside when I got back to give the same message. Growing pains.

I need a part-time office manager, and if you know someone who’s interested in (initially) a day a week, please ask them to get in touch and I’ll get back to them with a job spec.

That’s more or less most of what’s going on. A busy week 228.

Earlier in our involvement with Touch, Timo and I held a workshop with Alex Jarvis (currently at moo.com) and Mark Williams (now at Venture Three) to explore notation for RFID and the actions hidden in the readers.

One of my favourites that emerged from the day was this one.

It shows how far we were reaching for metaphorical handles – around which to characterise the technology, relying on the verbs associated with the result of the interaction: to Pay, to Open, to Delete etc.

Physically the systems are very different and are more frequently represented by their envelope packaging, like the Oyster card. Branded systems have chosen to use characters, my favourite is the Suica Penguin.

During the visualisation work, the cross sections in the readable volumes that emerged began to feel very strong visually. They capture an essential nature in the technology which is difficult to unearth with symbols based on metaphors.

Timo and I experimented with forms which have an almost typographic nature ranging to a more strictly geometric shape.

We settled on this most geometric version. It would be terrific to see this picked up and used as a symbol for the technology in public.

A CC licensed pdf of the ‘geometric’ can be found in the Touch vaults.

A few years ago I read a book called Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. It introduced me to the term social capital.

Social capital is an abstract measure that wraps up how many people you know, the information flow in your network, how many people owe you favours, that kind of thing.

High social capital goes hand in hand with being in groups, and with knowing your neighbours. People with high social capital have better jobs, live longer, and are healthier and happier. In areas with high social capital, there’s less litter, and car drivers behave better at road junctions. It’s big things and little things.

It’s a big deal. If you aren’t in any groups, and you joinjust one, your odds of dying next year are cut in half. If you’re a smoker and aren’t in any groups, statistically it’s about the same whether you should join a group or quit smoking. (Source.)

Many aspects of living are correlated with low social capital but a couple stand out. What damages social capital, at least that we know of, at least in the US, is two things: commuting, and watching television. Both stop you spending time with your friends and neighbours.

So as increased commuting times and TV dinners spread across the USA, social capital dropped drastically between 1975 and the end of the century. In that time, the average number of times Americans had friends over for dinner in a year dropped from 15 to half that.

I suspect, if we had ways to see it, we’d realise we just passed through a Great Depression of the social world.

Social software and Web 2.0

Social software was a buzz word a few years ago. It came from a realisation that websites, being online, could include people and groups of people in a way desktop applications couldn’t. Social software meant new design considerations and a renewed acknowledgement that different people use computers differently. Showing off, sharing, politeness and play would have to take their place next to usability.

I wrote a short summary of social software ideas back in 2004.

Web 2.0 is now another hackneyed buzzword, and it’s hard to remember what a shift it was when the modern Web started emerging. To me, Web 2.0 is social software releasing what it could be when social is baked in from the foundations, instead of being added as an extra to an old-school news site or online shopping catalogue.

Why social matters

It now feels natural to incorporate our friends into photo management, encyclopaedias and tracking our finances. I love that Web 2.0 has been so successful it barely needs to be pointed out and the ideas from social software are part of everyday Web design discourse.

But it’s important to remember that for ten years – a decade – the Web was not a naturally social space, where conversations and creativity could flourish side-by-side and hand-in-hand – and for many, now, it’s still not. That we’re prepared to give away our rights and privacy in exchange for leaving comments or joining a chat system in a game tells me that we’re still starved for social connection online.

The fact that our hobbies are social again is great. Flickr builds social capital, Twitter builds social capital. The fact that are hobbies are social again is important.

Social means showing off and sharing, and politeness and play, yes. But social also means healthier, wealthier and happier, and that’s a big, big deal. I believe that’s why social matters.

The bit of social I particularly care about is small groups, and my close friends and family, and I believe we’re still not designing well there. But that’s a story for another day.

Autumn arrived abruptly in our studios last week, and we weren’t the only people feeling it.

Our friends upstairs at Pachube are wiring up the world for real-time sensor-data sharing, and so were able to see the sudden addition of electric heaters in the building through the spike in the graph below…

Webb’s on holiday after delivering his keynote at Web Directions South. He’ll post the slides/notes when he returns from his spirit journey but in the mean-time here’s the bibliography.

Tom is still doing his data-botany for Ashdown, running around in servers with his butterfly net made of finest regexp to see what he can find, and making beautiful magnified watercolour illustrations for the info-bestiary.

The edges are starting show in this particular patch-ecology, as are the gaps – not only in terms of what’s not there, but also the space-between where we could add data-on-data and make interesting new things to show people. Again this is an approach that worked really well while we were developing Shownar, and it’s bearing fruit already for Ashdown.

I’m still working on some initial Ashdown brief writing and project planning (which is coming on leaps-and-bounds thanks to Tom’s investigations), a bit of new business development and going to the inaugural Icon Minds event tomorrow to see Bruce Sterling talk “Design Fiction” with Dunne + Raby.

Schulze started the week with a splash, launching the Immaterials film, as part of our collaboration with Timo, Einar and the Touch project It’s since been io9‘d, Ellis‘d and Slashdotted and we’re really pleased with how both the tech and design communities are engaging with it.

He’s also working with our modelmakers on new, improved Ojito prototypes and looking at manufacturing options and sorting out the final stages of our negotiations for a new studio.

Both Jack and myself are off at the end of the week to Sweden to run a really exciting new media design project workshop for one of our favourite clients which will be intense.

Finally – as Autumn has finally arrived and we found ourselves shivering in the studio, we’ve invested in some state-of-the-art thermoregulation apparatus, that we’ve codenamed “Ojiter”.

(O-heater… Geddit?).

Dont worry.

Normal pun-free programming resumes next week when Webb returns…

This image is a photographic mapping of the readable volume of a radio field from an RFID reader. The black component in the image is an RFID reader, similar to the component inside the yellow part of the oyster card reader. The camera has been fixed in its position and the reader photographed. Using a tag connected to an LED we paint in the edges of the readable volume with a long exposure and animate them to show the form.

Following Nearness, the chain reaction film, is Immaterials: The ghost in the field, our next film with Timo Arnall at the Touch project. There are 4 billion RFID tags in the world. They may soon outnumber the people. Readers and tags are increasingly embedded in the things and environments in which we live. How do readers see tags? When we imagine RFID and their invisible radio fields, what should we see? Immaterials explains the experiments we have performed to see RFID as it sees itself.

There is a power to be found in understanding everything from systems, to APIs, to components, to data, through to their enveloping materials (such as plastics and metals) as substrates to interfere with, bend and test. Through this we form complete wholes that make a common cultural sense to people, as products. The common category that contains services, APIs, plastics, componentry and their manufacturing processes is their behaviours and their consistencies, their immateriality.

We need to richly understand the behaviour and nature of the tag interaction with readers. Timo summarises:

It is incredible how often RFID is seen as a long-range ‘detector’ or how little relevant information is contained in technical data-sheets. When this information is the primary material that we are working with as designers, this is highly problematic. By doing these kind of experiments we can re-frame the technology according to our experience of it, and generate our own material knowledge.

There is a sequence in the video where I briefly discuss the directionality of tags. Most tags (and therefore their antenna) are flat. They have a direction. The shape of the readable volume changes according to the antennas orientation to the reader. The following image shows two volumes. The first visualised with green LEDs shows the readable volume from interactions between a reader and a tag parallel to it;  the second, visualised with red LEDs, shows the volume produced by the same tag held perpendicular. Two very distinctive and different shapes can clearly be seen.

It is not the radio field produced by the reader itself we are looking at. That is much, much larger. The images show the volume in which the energy in the space surrounding the reader is inducing a current large enough to wake and run the RFID chip at the end of the antenna in the tag. The readable volume can be mapped around a tag or inside the field produced by a reader component, but it only exists between the two.

Having produced these visualisations, I now find myself mapping imaginary shapes to the radio enabled objects around me. I see the yellow Oyster readers with plumes of LED fluoro-green fungal blossoms hanging over them – and my Oyster card jumping between them, like a digital bee cross-pollenating with data as I travel the city.

We work with traditional materials and fabrication for our product and industrial design, but the exciting contemporary products of our age are more than the sum of their materials, those poorly bound knots of plastic and silicon in our hands and homes.

Matt Jones described what we do as ‘Post Industrial Design.’ Perfect! Where once industrial design was concerned with radii, form, and finish, we now deal in behaviours, experience, shifting context, and time.

The products we design now are made with new stuffs. Service layers, video, animation, subscription models, customisation, interface, software, behaviours, places, radio, data, APIs and connectivity are amongst the immaterials for modern products.

Immaterials are the new substrates for opportunity and risk in product design.

Next week, Immaterials: Unravelling the antennae.

• 
  Augmented Reality Link Of The Week #1: Scope, by Frank Larsome. Scope is an AR tabletop wargame, played with special markers and (in a nice touch) any toys you have lying around. The interface and “game” elements are all projected onto the scene through the goggles.

  I like this because it’s consistent and realistic in its use of AR: it makes sense to wear goggles or some other kind of apparatus, because you’re an army commander surveying a battlefield. And I like that reality is genuinely being augmented here: the AR element is interface and head-up display, as opposed to some 3D element pretending to be real but clearly failing at that. AR is, quite rightly, part of the novelty of Scope.

  [via GameSetWatch]

• And from the sublime to the ridiculous, as it were. This is Tribal DDB Asia’s “3D McNuggets Dip“, “The first 3D Augmented reality dipping game with McNuggets”.

  It’s AR as pure novelty: a marker to be used with a Flash webcam app, dragging an AR McNugget around a screen much like you might with a mouse, the sole novelty in the proposition being AR. It’s barely AR; it’s more Marker As Interface – much closer in implementation to the way a Wii Remote might be used.

  And what’s it all in aid of? Promoting a foodstuff made of both chicken and mechanically separated meat.

  [also via GSW]

• Enough AR; onto ePublishing. Not the launch of the Kindle to international customers – but rather, the December launch of a series of eBooks for children.

  Excitingly, they’ve been targeted not at existing eReaders, nor a simplified eReader aimed at children, but to a device with a touchscreen that many kids already own: the Nintendo DS.

  It’s a deal between publishers Egmont Press and Penguin, with games company EA. The titles are priced at £24.99 – nearly the cost of a full DS game, but each cartridge has “6-8″ titles on it, which cuts the cost per book down to that of a paperback. And then, of course, there’s all the supplemental material.

  I like the idea of Flips (as the titles are known) because they’re basically nothing new: an existing product retargeted simply by aiming at a new, simpler, cheaper platform – and one that many kids already have. There’s nothing complex here in the software or the strategy, but if the implementation’s good, then perhaps they’ll be a success.

  Sure, the DS screen isn’t as easy on the eyes as a Kindle’s, and the resolution is lower, but that might be less of an issue for ten- and eleven- year olds.

  It’ll be interesting to see how they sell; it’ll also be interesting to see if it sparks interest in reading, and also where they’ll be stocked: games shops are likely to carry them, but will bookshops as well? We’ll find out in December, just in time for the Christmas rush.

• And, finally, a small piece of gaming nostalgia that made me smile: the 1978 Atari catalogue, featuring titles for the VCS/2600. I like it if only for its emphasis on anything but the game screens, instead focusing on the large amounts of commissioned art. That cover brings nothing to mind so much as Mr Benn, and reminds me of the escpaism – the different outfits one can wear – that computer games have always had at their heart.

I had the privilege of opening Web Directions South here in Sydney, this morning, with a hike through fanufacture, science fiction, social capital, cybernetics, and Neptune. The reception has been great and I totally enjoyed myself! What more can a man ask for.

A few folks requested a bibliography, so here we go. You can pretty much reconstruct my entire talk from this. Books and articles, in order of appearance!

• The Child Garden, Geoff Ryman
• The Personal Well-Tempered Environment, Dan Hill
• Mortal Engines, Philip Reeve
• Re:CP, Cedric Price
• Taklamakan, from A Good Old-Fashioned Future, Bruce Sterling
• Hawkins Electrical Guide
• The Argos Catalogue
• Visions of Technology, Richard Rhodes
• From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner
• How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand
• As We May Think, Vannevar Bush
• Augmenting Human Intellect (and the mother of all demos), Douglas Engelbart
• Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam
• Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon

Matt Webb’s down-under preparing for his talk at Web Directions South, prior to him going on holiday for a bit, so I’m writing the weekly update! I’m drunk with the power!

So – in summary: Schulze is spending the week in zero-g combat training, Tom is playing with an orangutan genome that he got from some guy in Zurich and I’m building a laser-harp.

Not really.

Jack’s working on Ojito some more this week, and with me on new business development. He’s also working on some animations with Timo for the Touch project.

Tom is still engrossed in material exploration of the data sets for Ashdown as Webb described so nicely in Week 225.

He’s wrangling it now to the point of finding the interesting edges and qualities to output that into graphical, understandable diagnostic artefacts that will help us when the design begins in earnest. I find this really useful in particular, as more of visual thinker – helps me get my head round the territory far faster. Boundary objects.

He’s also doing a little bit of sound design on the side for our casual game proto that we’re delivering at the end of the week. Busy boy!

I’m still working with Paul Pod on that sprint. It’s been a really short intense project but I’m super-pleased with how it’s going and from what we can tell so is the client – hopefully it will lead to something bigger…

My creative direction for it so far has been “Y’know… Peggle meets that Röyksopp video!”

Luckily, having worked with Paul before he’s able to understand garbling like that from me, and go far beyond what I imagine.

I’m also preparing the project plan and internal briefing documents for Ashdown. Writing a brief for a project that you’re going to design might seem a little odd, but of course it’s still valuable in order to really set some goals and scope going in.

What else? Well, I’ve already mentioned the new business development meetings with Jack, and I’m writing a final proposal for a mobile storytelling tool we hope to prototype.

Ok – with that, it’s back to the laser-harp.