Talk To Me

I'm really excited to hear about MoMA's latest exhibition, Talk To Me. There's another MoMa link to it here, giving you a sneak preview of some on the pieces collected.

Recording the communication between people and things. Curators, Paola Antonelli and Kate Carmody have gathered everything from Interfaces and Diagrams to Augmented Reality and harnessing Brain Waves.
Here are a few examples of what's on show:

Sparkfuns' Botanicalls.

An Arduino-based open-source software gives a voice to our silent everyday companions house plants.

The device, which uses moisture sensors in a plant’s soil to trigger messages sent to its human caretaker over a wireless network, opens up a playful, yet useful, line of communication. The messages are either tweeted or read out by a recorded human voice via telephone, and the plants are polite enough to send both distress calls and notes of thanks. While Botanicalls enables one particular form of inter-species communication, its fresh use of sensor technology could be implemented more broadly.



Media Surfaces: Interactive Media.

I'm a huge fan of BERG as they continue to explore communication, interaction with it and the unprecedented media saturation we live in. Where data bombards us from surfaces as intimate as a smartphone or as intrusive as digital billboards.

BERG’s film, which complements Dentsu London communicative strategy Making Future Magic, imagines that in the future, as Jack Schulze says, “bits of software will be playful at the edges of our lives without necessarily requiring direct and constant input.” In the film, your alarm clock kindly informs you know how late your morning train is running. A TV screen on stand-by acts as a passive feed for all your social media sites. A little like the clock wall, passively keeping you aware of the time. Twitter news updates quietly colonize the news-ticker update interface you see on some TV news programs. The receipt for a cup of coffee is enriched with the very latest breaking headlines, and a store window is animated with digital characters that move and interact with passersby. Ubiquitous but unobtrusive, the surfaces communicate in a manner that is dynamic and context-sensitive but only if we choose to pay attention.

Media surfaces: Incidental Media from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

Baker Tweet by Poke.

Another British company that I follow regularly and continues to be among the vanguard in our interaction with communication is Poke.

If you're not already aware of it, Poke London built, using Arduino technology. A device that lets the baker tweet out his freshest produce to the surrounding shoreditch ad-men and fancily sneakered designers. So they can take a break from Powerpoint and flash coding to gobble a pain au chocolate and a double espresso. A product I first wrote about on my website in 2009, under Top 10 Digital Trends to look out for when it first appeared in 2009.

The small, plain metal box (“bakery-proof,” the designers say, to withstand the heat and mess of the kitchen) is equipped with a dial, a button, and a screen interface, and it sends subscribers real-time notices on Twitter; the system can be customized online every day to reflect what the bakers plan to make. A hungry follower in the neighborhood can stop by right when the goods come out of the oven, and the bakery can let customers know when the treats are at their absolute peak. This seamless line of communication between bakers and customers, in turn, renders the city more intimate.

BakerTweet from POKE on Vimeo.

Out of The Box.

Out of the Box is an easy-to-understand mobile phone instruction manual specifically aimed at senior citizens. Designers Clara Gaggero and Adrian Westaway worked with the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, an interdisciplinary design-research unit devoted to projects aimed at improving people’s lives, especially the elderly and disabled.

The outcome was this mobile-phone packaging that doubles as an instruction manual based on familiar non-digital communication. Seniors often find learning new technologies frustrating, especially, the designers explain, “as they apply analogue modes of learning to the digital experience looking in the box for help that is not there.” Here, the box is also a bound book that contains the phone. The new owner leafs through the pages of the book, gradually encountering both assembly instructions and the corresponding hardware parts, which are integrated within the bound book. Once the user is comfortable with the workings of the phone, the package can be stored on a bookshelf.

Out of the box from Vitamins on Vimeo.

Joon Y. Moon’s Augmented Shadows.

Augment Reality continues to excite me, as it heads ever nearer more refined human interaction. Where it will find it's vocation is yet to be decided, but I'm confident great things await it. The more I see of it, the more I see ever expanding potential in human interface with everything we control or manipulate. It literally puts the virtual world in the palm of out hands.

The effect of Joon Y. Moon’s ghostly ecosystem of shadow creatures and objects is created with blocks on a tabletop that functions as a rear-projection screen and has a computer, infrared camera, and light source installed below it. The shadows exist in both a real and fantasy environment; animations transform the blocks into houses and awaken creatures around them. Moving the blocks around the table sets off programmed reactions: people gravitate toward a light source, trees grow around it, and birds fly away from the dark.



Here's MoMA's introduction to the exhibition.

"Whether openly and actively or in subtle, subliminal ways, things talk to us. Tangible and intangible, and at all scales from the spoon to the city, the government, and the Web, and from buildings to communities, social networks, systems, and artificial worlds things communicate. They do not all speak up: some use text, diagrams, visual interfaces, or even scent and temperature: others just keep us company in eloquent silence.

The purpose of design began to shift in the late 20th century from utility toward a more holistic combination of purpose and meaning. Thus far, 21st-century culture is centered on interaction, “I communicate, therefore I am” is the defining affirmation of contemporary existence, and objects and systems that were once charged only with formal elegance and functional soundness are now also expected to have personalities. Contemporary designers do not just provide function, form, and meaning, but also must draft the scripts that allow people and things to develop and improvise a dialogue.

New branches of design practice have emerged in the past decades that combine design’s old-fashioned preoccupations with form, function, and meaning with a focus on the exchange of information and even emotion. Communication design deals with the delivery of messages, encompassing graphic design, wayfinding, and communicative objects of all kinds, from printed materials to three dimensional and digital projects. Interface and interaction design delineate the behavior of products and systems as well as the experiences that people will have with them. Information and visualization design deal with the maps, diagrams, and tools that filter and make sense of information. In critical design, conceptual scenarios are built around hypothetical objects to comment on the social, political, and cultural consequences of new technologies and behaviors.

Talk to Me explores this new terrain, featuring a variety of designs that enhance communicative possibilities and embody a new balance between technology and people, bringing technological breakthroughs up or down to a comfortable, understandable human scale. Designers are using the whole world to communicate, transforming it into a live stage for an information parkour and enriching our lives with emotion, motion, direction, depth, and freedom."

The History of F-Commerce.

With F-Commerce being billed (and for some time now) as the next big thing, it’s interesting to take a quick look back at the short history of F-Commerce so far. And at the same time, with industry predictions at up to $30 billion in Social transactions by 2015 it’s even more interesting to note that only a very small percentage of retailers and brands are actually transacting socially so far.

It all started with the introduction of Facebook’s Virtual Gift Store back in February 2007, it was ahead of its time initially, and weirdly, only managed to do 15 million in transactions before it was closed in August 2010. Two years later the very first commercial F-Commerce transaction was for $34 through the 1-800-Flowers app.

You can see the full size infographic here

Apple Tree of Life

Artist Mike Vasilev created this beautifully simple infographic for Mashable called "The Apple Tree" that puts all Apple product designs for the last 35 years onto a family tree. Starting with the Apple I (1976) at the bottom of the tree, and branching off throughout the years. From early Towers, iBooks and iMacs, to the latter-day iPods, iPhones to the iPads. Can you find yours?

Now you've seen it you're left wondering why didn't someone think of it earlier. An example of great communication. "Why didn't I think of that, how blindingly obvious and beautifully simple". Very nice.

Happy Customers!

They say a happy customer is a repeat customer. But..

"Our relation to happiness often betrays an unconscious desire for disillusionment. The wanting of it and the having of it can seem like two quite different things. And this is what makes wishing so interesting, because wishing is always too knowing. When we wish we are too convinced of our pleasures, too certain that we know what we want. The belief that we can arrange our happiness, as though happiness were akin to justice, which we can work towards, may be to misrecognise the very thing that concerns us."

Adam Phillips on The Happiness Myth from The Guardian, via Bobulate.

I spent a lot of time thinking about happiness a few months ago. I thought maybe I could compose a few drawings, write a few thoughts, bind it all into a volume, and, possibly get closer to somewhere I wanted to be by crafting something of value. That way I could use what I'd learned and apply it to my work. Happy customers, buy more product.

But in frustration, I realized it was in folly. To try to define or explain or even sometimes pursue happiness feels to be a quagmire. Happiness is not a new problem and there wasn't much I could add to the conversation that hadn't already been said. There is no need for redundancy.

And then, I found Maira Kalman's blog And The Pursuit of Happiness, you need to scroll about 2/3rds of the page down. I think it's the best rumination on happiness I've witnessed recently. No where is there a mention of "this is how you achieve it." The perspective is always "this is what I saw", "this is what I enjoyed." This seems preferable, this seems healthier and wiser.

Maira Kalman's, The Pursuit of Happiness can be bought here. I know it's on my reading list.

It reminds me of what it is like to sharpen a knife on a whetstone. It's a laborious affair, pushing a blade against the slab, consistent in pressure and varying in angle and velocity. It's a process ripe with friction and frustration.

Excellence comes through an evenness achieved by variety. When through, one is left with a sharp knife and its remnants, sloughed off particles of the shorn blade in a slurry on the surface on the stone. Could happiness be that slurry, a residue of the process of sharpening ourselves through variety, frustration, and friction?

Maybe. But, I'll probably never know. Because happiness is not crafted, happiness emerges. And Brands need to understand this. Don't just tell me how good your product is, show me, and help me experience it myself.

Or has Louis C K got a far better handle on it. :-)



And how long is a happy? I think you can probably deduce a lot about a person and customer, from their answer. A moment? A day? A life? Right now? On the whole, I think it's very short little moments all strung together like pearls on a necklace. Maybe you don't get big happys until you're older, or maybe it's because you grow more contented. Demanding less of everything around you.

I don't know how you can really measure happiness. Ask any planner to comprehensively measure happiness in a focus group. It seems a silly question to ask "How happy are you?" On a scale of what to what? "Oh, you know, on a scale between Found A Penny and Three-Day Weekend". "Well, I'd say I'm about an Ice Cream Cone of happy."

Certain things die when you count them. People don't want metrics on their joy. But they do understand the appeal of the idea, as lots of us seem to think that if you force data through logic, you get control. But, it doesn't always work that way because people are emotional and not always logical. Pancakes for dinner tonight made me happy. Pancakes for dinner tomorrow night will make me sad. And the logic machine overheats and smokes away furiously.

I used to play hide and seek with my niece. It was fun and infuriating. She's not very good at hiding, so I'd have to pretend that I didn't see her. "Where is she? Where could she be?" I'd stumble around the house. Eventually, she'd get so impatient she'd yell hints. "I'm not over there!" or "Come upstairs!" or "You're on the wrong side of the room!" After more of my poor seeking, she'd get frustrated, pop out and say "I'm over here!"

It was more fun that way, than if I had seriously looked for her. And maybe happiness is a bit paradoxical like that. If you stop pursuing it, there are fewer places for it to hide.

In today's era of infinite consumer choice, paradoxically, there's a danger that to much choice only leads to greater dissatisfaction. And brands may well benefit from quality of communication over quantity of communication.

The more you just have to be listening when it says "I'm over here!"

Open Data. And how we can benefit from it

Open Date for the Arts - Human Scale Data and Synecdoche.

This is an article from BERG by Tom Armitage. One I'm sure, given the subject matter, he wont mind me sharing with you here.

Here's Tom's original post.

BERG are both developer and innovator, in all things that interact and inform people on a wide variety of platforms. And I have to be honest, out of all the feeds I follow, BERG is by far and away my favourite.

"This is a short talk that I gave as part of a 45-minute workshop with Matthew Somerville at The Media Festival Arts 2010 . As part of a session on how arts and cultural bodies can use open data, I talked about what I felt open data was, and what the more interesting opportunities it affords to are.

What is open data?

I’d describe “open data” as: “Making your information freely available for reuse in practical formats with no licensing requirements.

It’s not just sticking some data on a website; it’s providing it in some kind of data-format (be it CSV, XML, JSON, RDF, either via files or an API) for the intended purpose of being re-used. The more practical the format, the better. You can still own the copyright; you can still claim credit. That doesn’t stop the data being open. But open data shouldn’t require payment.

More importantly: What isn’t open data?

It’s not just sticking up web pages and saying it’s open because you won’t tell me off for scraping it. It’s not any specific format. One particular crowd will tell you that open data has to be RDF, for instance. That is one format it can be, but it doesn’t have to be. The success of your open data platform depends on how useful people will find it.

How do I know if it’s useful?

A good rule of thumb for “good open data” – and, by “good”, I mean “easy for people to use”, is something I’ve seen referred to as “The P Test“, which can be paraphrased as: “You can do something interesting with it – however simple – in an hour, in a language beginning with P.”

Making something super-simple in an hour in Perl/PHP/Python (or similar, simple scripting language, that doesn’t begin with P, like Ruby or Javascript) is a good first goal for an open data set. If a developer can’t do something simple in that little time, why would they spend longer really getting to grips with your information? This, for me, is a problem with RDF: it’s very representative of information, as a data format, but really, it’s bloody hard to use. If I can’t do something trivial in an hour, I’m probably going to give up.

What are the benefits of open data?

The big benefit of open data is that it gets your “stuff” in more places. Your brand isn’t a logo, and it isn’t a building; it’s this strange hybrid of all manner of things, and your information is part of that. That information might be a collection, or a catalogue, or a programme. Getting that information in more places helps spread your brand.

As well as building your profile, open data can also build collaboration and awareness. I can build something out of someone else’s information as a single developer messing around, sure – but I can also build products around it that stand alone, and yet build value.

For instance, Schooloscope. Schooloscope looks at data about UK schools and put it together to give you a bigger picture. A lot of reporting about schools focuses on academic performance. Schooloscope is more interested in a bigger picture, looking at pupil happiness and change over time. We built this site around DFE data, Edubase data, and Ofsted reports. We’re building a product in its own right on top of other people’s data, and if the product itself is meaningful, and worthwhile… then that’s good for both your product and the source data – not to mention that data’s originators.

But for me, the biggest thing about open data is: it helps grow the innovation culture in your organisation.

The number-one user of open data should be you. By which I mean: if your information is now more easily accessible via an API (for instance), it makes it easier to build new products on top of it. You don’t have to budget for building interfaces to your data, because you’ve done it already: you have a great big API. So the cost of innovation goes down.

(A short note on APIs: when you build an API, build good demos. When I can see what’s possible, that excites me, as a developer, to make more things. Nothing’s worse than a dry bucket of data with no examples.)

Similarly: the people who can innovate have now grown in number. If you’ve got information as CSV – say, your entire catalogue, or every production ever – then there’s nothing to stop somebody armed with Excel genuinely doing something useful. So, potentially, your editorial team, your marketing team, your curators can start exploring or using that information with no-one mediating, and that’s interesting. The culture begins to move to one where data is a given, rather than something you have to request from a technical team that might take ages.

And, of course, every new product that generates data needs to be continuing to make it open. Nothing’s worse than static open data – data that’s 12, 18 months old, and gets updated once a year as part of a “big effort” – rather than just adding a day to a project to make sure its information is available to the API.

What’s the benefit for everyone else?

This is just a short digression about something that really interests me. Because here’s the thing: when somebody says “open data”, and “developers using your information”, we tend to imagine things like this:

Schuyler Erle called the above kind of map “red dot fever”: taking geolocated data and just putting it all on a map, without any thought. This isn’t design, this isn’t a product, this is just a fact. And it’s about as detached from real people as, to be honest, the raw CSV file was.

So I think one thing that open-data allows people to do is make information human-scale. And by which I mean: make it relevant, make it comprehensible, move it from where the culture might be to where *I* am. And that lets me build an ongoing relationship with something that might have been incomprehensible.

I should probably show you an example.

This is a Twitter bot that I built. It tells you when Tower Bridge is opening and closing. I stole the data from their website. Or rather: Tower Bridge itself tells you when it’s opening and closing. Things on Twitter talk in the first person, so it should be itself. It becomes another voice in my Twitter stream, not just some bot intruding like a foghorn.

It exposes a rhythm. I built it because I used to work near Tower Bridge – I saw it every day. I liked the bot most when I was out of London; I’d see it opening and closing and know that London was still going on, still continuing. It has a silly number of followers, but not many of them interact with it daily. And yet – when you do, it’s useful; some friends found it helpful for reminding them not to leave the office for a bit.

And, you learn just how many times it opens/closes, but not in a numeric way; in a visceral way of seeing it message you.

This is Low Flying Rocks by my friend Tome Taylor. It’s a bot that scrapes NASA data about asteroids passing within 0.2AU AU of Earth (an AU being 0.2 of the distance from the Earth to the sun). That’s quite close! What you discover is a) there are lots of asteroids passing quite close, and b) we know that they’re there. You both learn about the universe, and a little bit about our capacity to understand it. And you learn it not in some big glut of information, but slowly, as a trickle.

It feels more relevant because it’s at my scale. And that leads to my final point.

Synecdoche

I want to talk about synecdoche, because I think that’s what these kind of Twitter bots are. Synecdoche’s a term from literature, best explained as “the part representing a whole“. That’s a terrible explanation. It’s better explained with some examples:

“A hundred keels cut the ocean“; “keel” stands for “ship“. “The herd was a hundred head strong“; “head” stands for “cow“.

So, for me, Tower Bridge is synecdoche, for the Thames, for London, for the city, for home. Low Flying Rocks is synecdoche not only for the scale of the universe, all the activity in the solar system, the earth’s place in that – but also for NASA, for science, for discovery. Synecdoche allows you to make big, terrifying data, human-scale.

I was thinking, to wrap this session up, about a piece of data I’d like if I was building a Twitter bot, and I decided that what I’d love would be: what the curtain at the Royal Opera House was doing.

It sounds boring at first: it’s going to go up and down a few times in a performance. That means once an evening, and perhaps the odd matinee. But it’s also going to go up and down for tech rehearsals. And fire tests. And who knows what else. It’s probably going up and down quite a lot.

And, as that burbles its way into my chat stream, it tells me a story: you may only think there’s a production a day in the theatre, but really, the curtain never stops moving; the organisation never stop working, even when you’re not there. I didn’t learn that by reading it in a book; I learned it by feeling it, and not even by feeling all of it – just a tiny little bit. That talking robot told me a story. This isn’t about instrumenting things for the sake of it; it’s about instrumenting things to make them, in one particular way, more real.

Yes, from your end, it’s making APIs and CSV and adding extra functionality to existing projects that are probably under tight budgets. But it allows for the things you couldn’t have planned for.

Open Data allows other people to juxtapose and invent, and tell stories, and that’s exciting."

The World Is Full Of Interesting Things

Here's an interesting presentation from Google Labs. They collected the most recent inspirational ideas and web projects in this document of 119 pages. It gathers a variety of different topics such as, advertising, history, politics, sport, art... under one roof.



Full page size here.

Notice and Wonder

Robert Krulwich, of Radiolab fame, is starting a new blog at NPR. So, first, NEW ROBERT KRULWICH BLOG! My enthusiasm is palpable. I just tossed up a handful of confetti.

Second, there's some really juicy bits in the first entry about the focus of the blog and its content. I'll just let Krulwich speak.

I like the word "wonder." It seems to me that near the heart of wonder is the simple act of noticing. I plan to pause, look, and notice the little wonders that catch my eye. Because there are a lot of people who do this very well. I'm going to follow the better noticers, the great field scientists, the best artists, photographers, journalists and peer over their shoulders to notice what they have noticed.

Biologist (and writer) Bernd Heinrich in his book "A Year In The Maine Woods" points out that because we humans are biggish creatures and so much around us is small and delicate (or shy), because we are busy and very into our lives, our minds, our problems, "most of us are like sleepwalkers here." We walk through our yards, our streets, our parks, through our days and "we notice so little. We see only bits and pieces, and then only if we look very, very close, or for very, very long."

Did you notice that? Yep, I just tossed up another handful of confetti.

So, wondering and noticing are tightly woven together. This reminds me of an interview the AIGA ran a couple years ago with Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg about the benefits of noticing.

It is ironic, people don't notice that noticing is important! Or that they're already doing it. It's kind of like breathing we're not usually that aware of it. It's much easier to recognize more outbound activities like brainstorming, testing, designing, refining. But noticing is just as important it's really where everything begins.

There's a funny Zen saying about that: "Don't just do something, sit there." It's a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them. Inputting is hard. Reading Krulwich's observations and reading the conversation between Portigal and Soltzberg infers that a couple things might be necessary, quiet (or a slower pace), and a willingness to intently focus on the things outside of yourself. Good noticing is selfless.

So how do we build up our noticing skills and spidey senses? Portigal has an idea for that too.

Circulate through an environment and note everything you observe, but using only one sense. First, observe from a distance, say, from on high so you can't hear what people are saying. Then sit in the middle of an active zone, but close your eyes. You may notice how rapidly one sense fills in for the other. Noticing is tough, yet rewarding work, and it begs to be documented.

We've more tools than ever to do so. I walk everywhere with a phone camera in my pocket, and I suspect you do too, so documenting visuals is easy. I can type on my phone, so I can capture text or overheard conversations.

I can record video if necessary. And then I can dump it to a Twitter account or a Tumblr blog to catalog everything. And if it's any good, maybe the noticing starts to arrange into larger patterns or if there gets to be a lot of documentation. I could maybe even print up a book of all the things I had noticed.

And wouldn't that be a nice thing to have on the bookshelf? My Year of Noticing and Wondering 2010.

As a person constantly in a position to produce works of communication or ideas, or whatever it may be, it feels good to give myself permission to kick back and inquisitively absorb things as they come. Part of noticing isn't seeking, it's highly reliant on serendipity and unexpected relevancy.

People are always surprised when they realize how many things they are actually experiencing but not really noticing. And it's such a simple activity.