Blog (page 53)

Here’s a question: is ‘zune’ – as in the Microsoft Zune – pronounced, in the UK, zoon (as in the US ‘tune’) or zyoon (as in the UK ‘tune’)?

I was thinking today that the ideas behind Web 2.0 are equally applicable to consumer electronics, and it got me wondering: by taking the ideas of Generation C and products, what simple changes would I make to the Zune portable mp3 player?

I’d break it down into the basic Gen C expectations of community, connected devices, and co-creation.

Community. What if the Zune synchronised with a desktop application like iTunes crossed with Flickr crossed with mix tapes? It’d take the best of the Web’s curatorial culture and let people create, share and gift playlists, with facilities for illustration and story-telling (actually, Amazon Listmania goes some way in this direction for books). This would be an application focused on the social cradle-to-grave experience hooks of music, rather than just the momentary commercial transaction like the iTunes Music Store.

Connected. The Zune should include an open, documented hardware API–a couple of copper contacts that act as the transmit/receive of a serial connection, sending out events and exposing a control interface to the player. What would it be used for? Who knows… but personally I’d spend a weekend building a cradle that, whenever the Zune was dropped into it, would immediately begin playing shuffled music and projecting the title on the ceiling. Simple and the kind of thing I’d use daily, but not the kind of thing anyone would bother mass producing. The secondary market around the iPod dock connector is a big part of its popularity, and this is a way Microsoft could challenge that with a much larger, grass roots amateur developer community.

Co-creative. Owners should be involved in the form design of their Zune. While Apple keep development around the dock connector closed, they’re open with the precise proportions of each iPod. This is incredibly useful. In the development of our Metal Phone project, we had to build a 3d model of the internals of the Nokia 5140i (requiring digital callipers and much time) in order to create the casting mold for it. A provided 3d file would have been much appreciated. With the Zune, Microsoft should go one step further: the plastic shells should be interchangeable, with press studs underneath so as to accept covers made from materials like Tyvek and fabric too.

These are first steps–minimal interventions in the functionality, ports and industrial design to make a Generation C product. I just wanted to see what I could come up with, if I was challenged to think of limited changes using this particular approach.

The reason I was thinking about this was because I went to an event this morning at the Microsoft London offices (titled The Online Opportunity – What Makes a Successful Web 2.0 Start-Up?) and it didn’t feel appropriate to ask the question I’d been planning to, about whether Microsoft saw consumer electronics evolving in a similar way as the Web, and what they’d be doing to support it.

As it turned out, the event was aimed at start-ups much larger and more developed than what I regularly consider to be start-ups, and I didn’t find it addressed the ideas of Web 2.0 at all. But Steve Ballmer – their CEO – spoke, and it was a privilege to see him in action– he’s a smart, highly informed and witty speaker. I have no great love or dislike for Microsoft, but much respect for Ballmer based on today. He handled an open Q&A with grace and aplomb, and made impeccable use of framing in language (he repeatedly used words like ‘instance’ and ‘inherit’ that come from an object oriented programming world, making business strategy easily understandable by developers). It was great to listen and learn.

Jeremy Keith has a comprehensive write-up (including my idea for umbrellas with tanning lamps in them). And thank you Ryan Carson for the kind invitation to attend.

Drawing hybrids and inbreds

We are around half way through the development of Olinda, the digital radio prototype we’re building for the BBC. Most of my efforts over the weeks since Matt’s post have been focused on how the object should behave and physically manifest. 

This post discusses some early drawing processes. We use drawing to surface and test many ideas easily and early. These drawing processes are also used to reach unexpected forms, and to examine why an object should look like it does.

About three weeks ago I met with Matt Ward from Goldsmiths. Ward has developed a drawing process which he works through to explore and interrogate ideas. Here we used it to develop ideas around products. His position for understanding how a product can manifest begins with a framework that includes how objects respond to anticipated contexts and tasks, in situations within a culture of consumption. He sketched this for me, and I’ve included it below. I like that it includes the designer, in a ‘context of production’. 

Ward’s approach is this. Begin by taking an existing radio, and draw it at the centre of a page. From here, choose four contexts or situations for development, like ‘in the kitchen’ or ‘listening to the football’. Write these labels in the four corners of the page surrounding the original sketch of the radio. Then evolve the form in the centre towards imagined new forms in response to the four situations.

The point here is to get away from the original form as far as possible, and to make many drawings. Below there are radios that are – more and less literally – in the contexts of decorating, the bathroom, kitchens and shop shelves.

Sometimes this leads to very strange things.

Critically, the purpose for such an exercise is not to draw good products but to begin evolving forms outside of an expected mold. As soon as a form emerges which catches, it is redrawn on a separate page, and bred between other sketches to develop new hybrids.

One is being selective in this process, but it is surprising how little control there is over what you expect to emerge, forcing issues with the sketches rarely yields anything satisfying. But this is not a storming, random process. It is very methodical, as a process of deconstruction. It is using drawing as thinking, which is its power.

What emerges is the discovery of what it is about that original radio that persists, in spite of the violent evolution. The drawings are really about ways of housing these commonalities, so you start thinking in terms of materials very quickly. The other thing that happens is you see particular twists. For example a kitchen radio should have legs, in order to sweep crumbs out from underneath it.

Making and drawing

In parallel to these processes, we have been in the workshop making objects from which to derive further drawings. This process started by thinking out a critical aspect of the form, in this case the connection between the two separate Olinda modules.

Once things start to get made, materials start to influence drawings and further made experiments. As the pieces of wood were cut, the shapes started to yield new directions and the wooden blocks emerged as a combinatorial way of interrogating traditional and less likely forms.

These are then fed back into the drawing and imagined interfaces are penned onto surfaces.

Some of the drawings begin to imply unlikely material qualities. The social module here looks like it’s been knitted from wool. The drawing is from a little over a week ago, and is based on a model used to investigate certain materials and assembly.

When Olinda is an object, it will be a product of unusual influences. It is unlikely that in this project such radical deviations from expected form will be appropriate. But these processes have made it possible to interrogate the assumptions embedded in the form of products. Objects like Olinda respond to forces from many territories, but the reasoning around that is a separate discussion.

Since the central point of my experience stack presentation was somewhat obscured because of my playing with the structure, I thought I’d have another bash at it here. Setting an idea up like this feels unnecessarily dogmatic, but frameworks are only meant to be rocket boosters to the actual design so it doesn’t feel too constraining. Anyhow. You can read the original presentation in addition to this article.

Five layers

The experience stack is a way of thinking about the different levels at which experience design operates. Experience design can be thought of as…

• branding;
• service design;
• product design;
• interaction design;
• human factors.

Just as with the OSI seven layer model of computer networking, these layers can be thought of in a tiered stack… but not reducible to one another. It is not possible to express the experience of discovery, in the service layer, to the cognitive components in the human factors layer, for example.

Let’s go into these, from the bottom up, and look at the contribution to experience from each.

Human factors

Human factors covers physicality and cognition. Cognition I’ve covered in the Mind Hacks-derived presentation, Assumptions, Attention and Affordances: it means we have to know how people pay attention and the limits on it; the impact of the workings of visual perception, and how things like arrows, shading and visual change are more important than we realise; and how to take advantage of all of this. I would include peripheral vision and tactile feedback in this.

Physicality is about understanding two things: First what I’ll call body thinking (where physical movement affects our emotions), and second, the physical and physical context of the interaction: how does one stand to approach an object, like a radio; how do its movements and shape indicate the possibilities and constraints of interaction. See for example our material explorations in wood and have a look at the identical and complementary shapes photo: that construct would be perfect as a replacement for the Bluetooth pairing process, because it shows clearly and two (and only two) objects are supposed to join together. Or also read about how to make objects ‘disappear’.

Interaction

The interaction layer includes many of the ideas in The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design and From Pixels to Plastic: it takes common interaction patterns like play and sociality (see social software), and positive and negative emotions and drives, and uses them appropriately.

In the Experience Stack presentation, I discussed the different ways in which games start… learning from successful interaction patterns and applying them to the product at hand is definitely part of this layer. (For example, seeing that we enjoy observation can lead to product feature ideas.)

Knowing how people will adapt their product – applying customisation – and showing how that is possible is also, to an extent, part of the interaction layer.

It’s about making the interaction not just something to be learned from the manual, but part of a pleasant, intuitive, engaging experience–and the best way to do that is to learn from other experiences.

Product

In the middle of the stack is how people experience their products–not while directly interacting with them, but nor in the more distant, less controllable way of brand. Products should be firmly identified: a product which has a sentence to identify it and a target audience can also have goals and metrics to tell when it’s performing well, and will be better understood by its team, and its host organisation. Customers will be able to tell other people about it, and develop a personal understanding of the product and how it will behave.

Metaphorically, a product should be ‘shelf-demonstrable’–able to be understood simply from a first look, even if that understanding growth in breadth and richness in the future.

The point of this layer of the stack is two-fold. It says that the best way to have a good product experience is simply to have a good product. But it also says that predictability and a common understanding of the product as a discrete thing is important (it is for this reason that I’ve said previously that products are people too).

Note that this doesn’t mean that a product must only do one thing, because people are capable of seeing very abstract bundles of behaviours as ‘things’… but if a product does two things, the conception of what it’s truly about may need to change. And adaptive design points out that products have fuzzy edges that change at different speeds, but that’s just something to incorporate into the overall understanding of what a product is, and design for accordingly.

Also in this layer are firm identifications of the other actors and situations. Who will be using this product? In what situations? Considering archetypal people and situations can help target product features.

Service

Experience hooks (more) are those moments you remember in your story of your life with a product: how you meet, how you show your product off to friends, how you clean it. When I’ve discussed this before, I’ve referred to unboxing as a key moment in the product life-cycle.

Designing for these moments in the product-as-service is the service design layer of experience, and lets us associate brand ideals with product features. For example, certain experience hooks can be made a feature of–especially social, or particularly easy, for example.

Brand

The experience of the product is cloaked in messages, direct and indirect, which set up mental understandings of the product. A person then uses these models for implicature–the understanding of a product beyond its explicit communication.

It’s rare the brand – this high-level experience – can be seen as separable from the product itself, but Volkwagen’s Night Driving commercial and the site They’re Beautiful by Jackson Fish Market both create experiences beyond the product. These brand experiences affect the use of the product itself because the different layers of the experience stack are indistinguishable in people’s mind, and even weakly associated still bleed into one another.

Consideration of the brand influences what design and feature decisions are made at every other layer in the stack.

Rationale and approaches

Central here is the Generation C trend (people form communities; expect to be connected socially and electronically; Gen C are comfortable with complexity and want control; they are creation and expect co-creation), and their demands. And then ideas like social software and adaptive design point in the direction of a more holistic kind of design. Experience design is what bundles this all together, as it implies that all aspects of the product experience (from every part of the stack) are considered as one by the user, customer, or viewer… and if the experience is awful, they feel awful.

Approaches come out of using the stack–looking for experience hooks and considering the context or situation can help generate ideas. Using the brand as a guiding principle can help select features. Running through the interactions with the product and making sure they’re aligned with emotions and behaviours that are enjoyed or avoided also helps. These are all very direct uses of the experience stack.

More generally, it has to be realised that experience is very badly understood by observation: the designer has to take part. I can sum this up: Nothing is easier than believing we understand experiences we’ve never had (source).

At d.construct at the end of last week, I presented on the experience stack. This is an idea I’ve been mulling, thinking about the various layers of experience in a way analogous to the seven layer OSI model of computer networking.

As usual, I’ve put the slides and transcript online. Read the Experience Stack.

Some portions of the presentation went well, but overall I wasn’t pleased with my articulation of the ideas. The comments I’ve received and read online are also mixed–some people got a lot out of various slides, while others felt presentation was confusing. That’s a shame. I used to feel okay about confusing pieces, because nonlinearity can be fun and confusing is a price you pay. But I’d prefer now to have a baseline accessible to everyone, so I want to review what happened.

What made the talk confusing

I threw the structure baby out with the bathwater. My presentations so far this year have shared a very definite rhetorical structure. In an attempt to get some distance from this, I organised the material as a fool’s alphabet, starting with A is for adaptive design and finishing with Z is for zooming user interface.

The scattered approach was intended to mirror the experience of people with products, where every pattern is assumed meaningful and so we have to design for all levels of the experience stack simultaneously.

It also meant, however, that the fundamentals of a good presentation were skipped: I did not say, at the beginning ‘this is what you’ll get'; I did not, at the end, give a simple, graspable take-home message (violating my own point about treating everything as products with simple statements of intent); I did not use pacing to help people know when I was illustrating versus when I was building up to a more substantive point.

In short, I took away the contextual cues people use to feel situated and comfortable within a presentation, and removed the explicit ‘resets’ I usually use to help people who have drifted off get back into the flow. In short, people felt lost!

I had too much material. There are simply too many examples in this presentation, and they aren’t grouped well because of the constraints I set myself. I usually leave room to dive into examples if the audience are looking lost, but because of the quantity of material I didn’t give myself time to digress on the fly.

I tried a live demo. No matter that it worked in AV check on the previous day… I was using a Wii remote control to pan and zoom an image embedded in a Quartz Composer movie embedded in a Keynote slide, controlled by an application broadcasting Wiimote data to a custom-written Quartz Composer patch. That’s precarious at the best of times. Ironically it functioned perfectly well technically–I just forgot that I gesticulate a lot more than I notice when I talk, that my hands shake, and that – when I’m on stage – I get so focused that I forget what buttons do what (seriously: I can’t even take photos on stage unless my camera is already turned on, because I can’t remember what button does what).

Other technical problems were the metadata portions of my slides being cut off (my computer recognised the projector differently on the day), a couple of movies freezing (I think because the presentation slides had been set up a lot longer than I’d tested), and the loss of sound.

I didn’t explain the core premise sufficiently. This is partially due to the absence of structure, but also because I could have used the experience stack as a common thread but choose to leave it till later to introduce it. Even then, I didn’t spend enough time explaining myself. Consequently some people didn’t get what they came for (and for those folks, I’ve written up the stack concept itself in a separate post).

Why I made these mistakes

There are two reasons. First, I tried to change too much at once from my usual style. There are problems with using the old rhetorical structure, so I needed to find an alternative… but it would have been better to make that shift with old material. I don’t understand this new material well enough yet to really, really condense it, and my discomfort with this style of presenting almost made me freeze on stage about halfway through. It’s been a long time since that happened.

Second, I took a risk and it didn’t pay off. I wrote the full talk in long-hand before delivering it, and it looked unusual but I genuinely thought it would work. In retrospect I can see that it works better as something written: you need to be able to refer back to make sense of the structural reveals and the examples.

What I was pleased with

All of the above makes it sound like my talk went terribly. It didn’t – I’ve had good comments too – but I’ve had a few talks recently go as well as I could ever hope and that’s pushed my standards pretty high.

I’m still pleased with the experience stack concept itself. I think I have, now, a decent way of understanding and explaining experience design, in a way that draws together my various other explorations.

I enjoyed putting together the slides. I colour controlled the slides again (as discussed in this first slide of Products are People Too), and it really binds them together visually. And the first slide uses gentle video in the background, with the ocean washing the beach behind the title. I’m going to do more with that.

This was also my first outing of the new version of last year’s 2D presentation code, this time integrated with Keynote and using a Wiimote. It didn’t go smoothly, but it had to be used to be understood and I know a lot now about what needs to be built.

Finally I was pleased – and thankful for – the friendliness of those who came to d.construct 2007. I talked with a ton of people afterwards, and my talk got a good reception with at least some of the audience. It was fun to see the notes they’d taken, and to hear about their work.

Books

I’ve been asked for a list of books (and other things to read) mentioned. They are, in order:

• Spares, Michael Marshall Smith (slide 1)
• History of the Button blog (slide 3)
• How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand (slide 2)
• Design for the Real World, Victor Papanek (slide 8)
• Mind Hacks, Tom Stafford and Matt Webb (slide 14)
• Fool’s Alphabet, Sebastian Faulks (slide 17)
• A Theory of Fun, Raph Koster (slide 19)
• Microsoft Inductive User Interface Guidelines (slide 24)
• The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman (slide 25)

And the presentation slides and summary of experience stack idea are also online.

A couple of months ago I put the feelers out for interns. Well, we have two starting today. Say hello to:

Alex Chadwick is an electrical engineer. In-between touring the canyons of the US and university in October, he’s coding and building the guts of Olinda, getting us stocked up with microcontrollers, and has me really, really wanting a decent oscilloscope (apparently it’s super useful, but I’ll be happy if it can sing and dance). Many thanks to David Smith for putting us in touch.

Jeff Easter is an interaction designer currently studying Design Interactions at the RCA. He’s been with us for a week before, on user flows and screen design, and for September it’s more of the same, plus photography, carpentry, and iterating, iterating, iterating on form design.

Both super chaps. It’s going to be an excellent month.

Here are some clips from some science fiction films I’ve been enjoying recently. There are some really potent sequences, and some nice glimpses from the past into our futures.

This first clip is from the film Ultraviolet, which isn’t very good. There is a really nice sequence around a printable phone:

The following clip is from Runaway with Tom Selleck. Imagine Magnum but in the future, with killer robots and Gene Simmons as the baddie. Awesome. I love the idea that ‘micro-electronics’ might be more dangerous than terrorists with atomic bombs.

This next two clips are my favourites. They are from John Carpenter‘s Dark Star. Long before he dreamt up Snake Plissken, he made this film about four men on a long term mission in space, to blow things up with nuclear bombs (or ‘Thermostellar Devices’).

One of the bombs has a malfunction because a laser broke. In the first clip, the main ship computer has to negotiate with the bomb to convince it not to blow up in the ‘bomb bay’. I love how they’re really polite to each other, but bristling underneath. It feels a lot like when I try to open Mac-based Illustrator DXF files in Solidworks.

This goes fairly smoothly until later, when the bomb is rearmed. One of the crew (Doolittle) has to go and negotiate with the bomb, face to face, to convince it not to explode. It’s quite strange. He talks on a radio headset, but he goes outside in his space suit to look at the bomb, eye to eye. There is a face created by the instruments on one of it’s sides. Terrific cod philosophy too, looks like it’s derived from Kubrick; the bomb turns out to be a little stupid.

It all makes me think of Tom Armitage‘s talk about politeness in software at Reboot 9.0, but in a way that directly misses the point.

One bit of consultancy we’ve done recently has been on new programme formats for mobile devices. It was a bit of a dash–just a few days thinking and writing, and a week to pull together communication material.

The brief was set by the BBC, and there was a progressive clause in the contract: S&W do the thinking, produce communication material and present to the project team there; the BBC can use any of the ideas without restriction, but we retain copyright on the report itself.

So while I could, in theory, copy and paste the report into this blog, it seems fairer to let the folks have a good run at developing the programme ideas themselves. I’ll talk a little about our approach and the deliverables instead.

Approach

The brief was this: what would successful programmes broadcast to mobile devices be? Put aside, for the moment, interactivity and on-demand programming.

(The BBC are looking ahead a little, as you can see.)

It seems to us that successful programming has to acknowledge three factors: the technological constraints, possibilities and expectations of the medium; the interests of the audience, and; the situation in which the programming and audience meet.

TV and radio have long histories as media and are well understood. For TV, the audience varies and so we have different channels to cater for demographics and interest (the situation is more-or-less fixed, though there are different TV channels for certain situations like gyms and bars). The situation of radio varies more, but again different stations cater for focused and backgrounded listening. And of course, programming content varies over the day for both TV and radio–whether it’s late night or mid afternoon is a great predictor of the audience and its constraints.

Programming for mobile devices, on the other hand, will land in unpredictable and highly variable situations… it’s a huge factor compared to the variability of the audience (and we can forget the constraints of the medium, for the moment, given it’s too new to have historical momentum).

We focused on finding a way to talk about the experience of different situations.

Two axes seem important:

• Mobility. Can the viewer/listener devote 30 minutes to this programme, or are they grabbing a few minutes that could end at any moment? That is: can they sit, or must they move?
• Attention. Must the viewer/listener background the programme because the situation demands attention, or can they concentrate?

Using these two axes we can break the situation of members of the audience down into four archetypical situations. The situation will demand…

• attention (but the viewer can control their movement): like being at work.
• nothing (the viewer can concentrate, and control their movement): home.
• mobility and attention: it’s like being out shopping.
• just mobility (but the viewer can concentrate on something else): on the bus.

(Incidentally, if persona are archetypal people, what would be a good word for archetypal situations?)

Given that – and the technological possibilities of the medium – we can take basic programme ideas and coerce them into being particularly good for the common audience situations, rather than just so-so.

We ended up with three main clusters of programme concepts:

• News (at various attention levels)
• Radio-like: High mobility and backgrounded
• TV-like: Low mobility and focused

Other factors come into play too, of course. Mobile devices – in particular mobile phones – are very intimate devices. We did some experiments with video and found the full face, straight to camera pieces were significantly better for these devices than presenters talking from behind a desk (Ze Frank‘s natural medium, perhaps). Oh, and the way people use their phones when they’re killing time… there’s some fascinating research there too.

But anyway, I don’t want to say much more. Just that frameworks like these aren’t a replacement for inspiration and thinking… it’s important to take them with a pinch of salt and be ready to discard them. What a framework is good for is as an explanatory tool, communicating the rationale of a nuanced concept through an organisation so that it can be developed and not reduced as it gets passed on.

Deliverables

Usually for this kind of consultancy we develop a slide deck in workshops with the client, or turn up and present. Since these programme concepts needed to transmit through the BBC, a different form was called for.

The image at the beginning of this post is of two of the three posters we delivered (each A2: 16.5 x 23.4 inches).

On the left, the poster discusses the background to the project, frameworks, and how the ideas could develop with interactivity and location awareness in the future. The poster on the right presents news and three other programme concepts (including a development of Ambient EastEnders).

Below is the third poster. It presents three more concepts, and some thoughts about successful forms of mobile video. All three look pretty tremendous printed large.

Experimental posters

Producing posters was an experiment for us–successful, I think. We were pleased to work with Alex Jarvis, who brought to bear his exceptional talent on the graphic design and illustration.

Plus we got to explore the idea of a poster as a kind of zooming user interface, where there are a series of self-similar levels of detail that progressively reveal as you move closer to the paper. So when you stand across the room, half the paper is legible with a title and a huge graphic. Moving closer, half of the rest (a quarter) become legible with a subtitle for the main segment and more concept titles. At the closest level of reading, the poster functions as a page of broadsheet. The next time around I’d like to investigate that more.

Thanks

I’d like to thank Dan Pike and the project team at the BBC for choosing to bring us in to work on this, and for their open approach. I look forward to seeing where the concepts are taken in the future!

If you asked me to pick the two cards Schulze & Webb play with abandon in the consultancy game, they’d be Product and Experience.

Products should be what toy companies call shelf-demonstrable–even sitting in a box in shop, a product can explain itself to the customer (or at least tell its simplest story in a matter of seconds). Organisationally, understanding a website or component of a mobile service as a product means being able to describe it in a single sentence, means understanding the audience, means focusing on a single thing well, means having ‘this is what we are here for’ as a mantra for the team, and it means being able to (formally or informally) have metrics and goals. Here’s it in a nutshell: You know it’s a product when it has an ethos–when the customers and the team know pretty much what the product would do in any given circumstance.

Then we play Experience. The experiential approach is how you and the product live together and interact. The atoms are cognitive (psychology and perception), while the day-to-day is it’s own world: Play, sociality, cultural resonance, and more. Each of these is an area of experience to be individual understood in terms of how it can be used. The third level of experience we deal with is context: How the product is approached (physically and mentally), and how it fits in with other products, people and expectations.

We can go a long way, and make decent recommendations of directions and concrete features, with those two cards.

And now we’re making a radio. As much as we’ve said these approaches apply across media, services and (physical, consumer) product, working with physical products has recently been only in our own research. Hey, until now. Until now!

Olinda is a digital radio prototype for the BBC

For the past month we’ve been working on the feasibility of Olinda, a DAB digital radio prototype for the BBC (for non-UK readers: DAB is the local digital radio standard, getting traction globally). That stage is almost over now – oh and yes, it’s feasible – so now’s a good time to talk.

Olinda puts three ideas into practice:

• Radios can look better than the regular ‘kitchen radio’ devices. Radios can have novel interfaces that make the whole life-cycle of listening easier. At short runs, wood is more economic as plastic, so we’re using a strong bamboo ply. And forget preset buttons: Olinda monitors your listening habits so switching between two stations is the simplest possible action, with no configuration step.
• This can be radio for the Facebook generation. Built-in wifi connects to the internet and uses a social ‘now listening’ site the BBC already have built. Now a small number of your friends are represented on the device: A light comes on, your friend is listening; press a button and you tune in to listen to the same programme.
• If an API works to make websites adaptive, participative with the developer community, and have more appropriate interfaces, a hardware API should work just as well. Modular hardware is achievable, so the friends functionality will be its own component operating through a documented, open, hardware API running over serial.

What Olinda isn’t is a far-future concept piece or a smoke-and-mirrors prototype. There’s no hidden Mac Mini–it’s a standalone, fully operational, social, digital radio.

The intention with Olinda is that it’s maximum 9 months out: It’s built around the same embedded DAB and wifi modules the manufacturers use. And it has to be immediately understandable and appealing for the mass market. Shelf-demonstrable is the way to go.

The BBC should be able to take it to industry partners, and for those partners to see it as free, ready-made R&D for the next product cycle. We have a communications strategy ready around this activity.

So that’s why I’m proud to say that, when complete, the BBC will put the IPR of Olinda under an attribution license–the equivalent of a BSD or Creative Commons Attribution. If a manufacturer or some person wants to make use of the ideas and design of the device, they’re free to do so without even checking with the BBC, so long as they put the BBC attribution and copyright for the IPR that’s been used on the bottom.

More later

The feasibility wraps up in the next week or so, as I budget the build phase. When build starts, we have an intern starting–perhaps two (yes, we got a great response to putting those feelers out). But that deserves its own post.

And there’s a lot to talk about. For start, what Olinda will look like (we have drawings and form experiments). And how the Product and Experience approaches will manifest.

That’s for later. In the meantime, here’s the Frontier Silicon Venice 5 module operating on a breadboard:

The DAB module is wrapped in insulation tape, and you can make out the stereo socket (it’s blurry because it’s standing out of the focal plane) and the antenna. Running from the breadboard is a serial cable to my computer which is assembling and decoding messages for tuning, playing, receiving radio text messages and so on.

Thanks to Tristan Ferne, Amy Taylor and John Ousby and their teams at BBC Audio & Music Interactive for making this happen.

(Incidentally: Olinda, the name of this project, is aspirational, chosen from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (Olinda is transcribed at the bottom of that page). We could do worse that help along the radio industry in the same way Calvino’s city grows.)

I gave a talk at Interesting 2007 about three weeks ago now. The day was great and though I wasn’t able to stay for all of it, I really enjoyed myself, and the few talks I did catch were very absorbing. So well done to Russell for sorting all that out.

I gave a talk on comics and while there are some images of me talking about them on Flickr, some people have asked for a list of the comics I discussed. Below is the list and brief descriptions. I’ve also transcribed my talk and put the slides online: Comics and Pictures.

Though I read lots of different comics, I only really follow four authors: Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore and Garth Ennis. Really, you can’t go that wrong reading stuff by these guys, they are awesome, although many people find Ennis a bit heavy. Here is the list in the order that I discussed them:

• The Kingdom by Mark Waid and drawn by Ariel Olivetti and Mike Zeck. Wikipedia has a good description of Hypertime, so no need to hunt down this comic if you are just curious.
• Sea of Red by Rick Remender, Kieron Dwyer and Salgood Sam. This is the one about vampire pirates.
• New Universal by Warren Ellis and Salvador Larroca. This is the comic I discussed where all the characters are derived from film stars.
• Planetary by Warren Ellis. This is really good, everyone should read it. There are four main books, all are good. I specifically discussed Planetary Crossing Worlds which includes the Batman story.
• The Filth by Grant Morrison. This is the best comic that there is, everybody should read this. It is the one with the guy who speaks with thought bubbles.
• Desolation Jones by Warren Ellis and J.H. Williams III. I’ve mentioned this before. It is a great read, and drawn with deft elegance, really nice work.
• I spoke about Madman. Very weird but good.
• I also mentioned a cover from The Flash who can run really fast, and that’s about it.

I’m enjoying a couple of American authors at the moment: Ed Brubaker‘s Criminal, and Joss Whedon‘s Astonishing X-men is good too.

That is the list of comics I mentioned. They stock them at my favourite comic shops: Orbital and Gosh, both nicely located in central London.

Having slipped from Pulse Laser to Lazy Pulsar, occasionally twitching in the cosmos but not really shining very hard, I am going to write a post.

I had a really good time at Reboot 9.0 this year, never been before, but it was top drawer. My favourite discoveries were the brilliant David Smith and Tina Aspiala. Also good to catch up with old friends at the shiny and new Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. So in the spirit of the people, I sat in the talks, looking through the faces oscillating between laptop and speaker, and drew them. Some drawings went into Webb’s talk, my favourites are below, and the rest are in a Flickr set.

I liked this guy’s glasses a lot.

Smart suit.

This guy kept fidgeting and glancing between laptop and presenter.