In the last two weeks I’ve seen three documentaries dealing with communication and networks.

Firstly, a broad and ambitious film from Ericsson, taking on the ‘networked society’ including interviews with David Weinberger, Catarina Fake and Eric Wahlforss.

Each of the interviewees discusses the emerging opportunities being enabled by technology as we enter the Networked Society. Concepts such as borderless opportunities and creativity, new open business models, and today’s ‘dumb society’ are brought up and discussed.

The next film from Nokia brings daily life around networked communication technologies to the forefront, and does it through lovely experiential sequences. However it does come across much more as a branding exercise or promotional piece, and doesn’t offer to explain or explore the practices it shows.

Third is a film by Ben Mendelsohn and Alex Chohlas-Wood about the physical, geographic and material infrastructure that goes into running the internet.

Lower Manhattan’s 60 Hudson Street is one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity. This short documentary peeks inside, offering a glimpse of the massive material infrastructure that makes the Internet possible.

There is clearly a need to unpack the increasingly technology-inflected geography, and social and cultural practices of the world we inhabit, so it is good to see films like this being made.

I have five works in MoMA’s latest exhibition ‘Talk to Me’ in New York. The works are Nearness, Immaterials, Media Surfaces, The Journey and Suwappu.

I have written more about the exhibition and the works at the Touch and BERG weblogs. The exhibition has also been reviewed by CNN, the New York Times, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal amongst others.

I’ve been quite taken with the films of Adam Lisagor for a while.

I make small, palatable videos, like commercials, for companies involved in tech, to figure out how to convey the essence of their products in concise, accessible ways.

I like to think that I’m able to do this because I think slowly enough to notice the exact points while using a product at which I respond with the most delight. And if I can reproduce those moments on-screen, without explicitly saying that they’re delightful, an audience will intuitively understand the delight they might feel themselves.

(From an interview in Business Insider.)

He’s good at surfacing the joy and pleasure in some of the smallest interactions, particularly evident in this ad for the Jambox by Jawbone.

A truth that releases a waterfall of emotion. It is this energy that propels us through The Tree of Life. A voluptuous, bulging energy shaped and encouraged by sweeping camera movement, ultra wide lenses, lyrical blocking, the safe-harbor of Jessica Chastain’s face, and the vacillation in Hunter McCracken’s. These combine to create scenes that perfectly capture the rapturous feelings of childhood. Sensations evoked when light & dark entwine, and our instinctual knowledge that these things are the same.

And on how to approach the film:

A moment long enough for me to relax, and I was suddenly taken by a feeling of great tenderness and calm. I don’t completely understand why I felt this, but the inclusion of these CGI dinosaurs struck me as an particularly affectionate and loving decision. Terrence Malick believes in his audiences, and has faith that we also can believe. It’s the feeling of your mother brushing the hair off your forehead as she tells you a bedtime story. You protest because she’s changed a part of the usual tale, or it’s not the way you want it to be, but smiling, she says “Shhh shhh. Just listen.”

From the brilliant Kartina Richardson.

Many of the early ideas were fairly conceptual: Not a place or a thing, but an idea tied to the use of Foursquare itself (“10 check-ins”) or the kind of real-world social behavior the service was attempting to leverage (checking into the same place three times in one week, or checking in with two people of the opposite sex). The round shape and circular border directly referenced Boy Scouts merit badges. Beyond that, Sheibley says the relevant design context wasn’t logos, it was the familiar instructional iconography meant to signal ideas without words: “How do you communicate to people in an airport, who don’t speak the same language, where the bathroom is?”

My favourite movie of all time.

A film with one compelling relationship at its center might not survive the bombardments of the action formula its script demands, and that’s another reason “Midnight Run” is so special. There are at least half a dozen relationships throughout the film surrounding Grodin and De Niro that ring true in their entirety. A phone call between an angry mob boss and his bumbling enforcer, for example, could very easily be made into a transitional scene devoid of intrinsic value, but this film does something different on those occasions: it utilizes shards of moments as points of insight and endows them with authenticity largely nonessential to the plot.

What if there was a generic tool to link the digital and the physical worlds? A way to touch an object, to select and see its digital augmentation? It would just send a message via your chosen device: laptop, mobile, home wifi et al. The equivalent of a digital finger. Passive objects would act as physical buttons to the digital world. All that these objects would require is that we perceive their purpose, and see how to act on them. We would need to have an accessible tool to make our selection, and carry out the link between the two worlds.

“They deliver potentially fundamental insights (Schneider, 2005) into the interaction between humans and the constructed environment surrounding them, including the mundance aspects of everyday routine (Carroll, 2000), even the potential subversion of the system or setting through its agents (Blythe & Wright, 2006). The user is advanced into a character or specific persona placed in fictional but feasible settings (Nielsen, 2002). The representation of scenarios through prototypes, use of storyboards, video, rapid prototyping tools and stories, annotated sketches, cartoons, photographs, role-playing or live dramatization (Suri & Marsh, 2000), allows the vision conveyed through the scenario to be opened up to critique (Carroll, 2000).”

“Design, here, does not assume the traditional role of problem-solving, but acts as a critical agent in the enquiry about real human needs and values by evoking reflection (Carroll, 1995) and stimulating debate amongst designers, industry and the public (Dunne & Raby, 2001). This critical strand in design, termed speculative design, critical design or design fiction, has emerged as a field in its own right and is establishing itself with the main markers of a new discipline, such as seminal publications (Dunne, 2005; Antonelli, 2008), exhibitions and conferences.”

Here’s David Webster, chief strategy officer in Microsoft’s central marketing group, explaining their anti-screen strategy:

“Our sentiment was that if we could have an insight to drive the campaign that flipped the category on its head, then all the dollars that other people are spending glorifying becoming lost in your screen or melding with your phone are actually making our point for us.”

The problem of glowing rectangles is a subject close to my heart, and Matt Jones has been bothered by the increase in mobile glowing attention-wells.

I think Microsoft & Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s advertising strategy stands out in a world full of slick floaty media. The only problem is that without any strategy towards tangible interaction, I’m not sure the ‘tiles’ interaction concept is strong enough to actually take people’s attention out of the glass.

The Longest Photographic Exposures in History.

Olars is an electronic interactive toy inspired by Karl Sims’ evolved virtual creatures. Having thousands of varieties in movement and behaviour by attaching different geometrical limbs, modifying the angle of these, twisting the body itself, and by adjusting the deflection of the motorised joints, results in both familiar and strange motion patterns.

Sumedecina and Graphical data fiction.

By Frank Gilbreth (1912)

Via lecture 4: traces at light matters.

Still from the film xXx from Mark Coleran’s portfolio.

In Movie OS, visual storytelling is used to make the system’s important, critical reaction to a user’s action abundantly clear. In Movie OS, you know if you’re logging into Facebook.

I’d argue that visual storytelling doesn’t exist – if it does, it hardly exists at all – in computer or consumer eletronics user interfaces. The entire palette of visual storytelling in terms of interface, through accident of history, is purely engineering and control-led.

This is where, I’d say, Apple is grasping when it says that interfaces should sometimes look toward real-life objects. Real-life physical objects have affordances that are used in effective visual storytelling – and animation – that can be used well to make clear the consequences of actions. It’s more complicated than that, though, and it can go horribly wrong as well as right.

Sun’s path June to December Via Tom Armitage.

Designers see the world not simply as it is, but rather as it could be. In this perspective, the world is a laboratory to explore the contingency of the existing and the thinking in options. Imaginations of the contra factual are a key source for the creation of alternative political, technological, social, or economic constellations of artefacts, interfaces, signs, actors, and spaces. At the same time, strategies of materialization are pivotal to shift the boundary between the fictional and the real and to finally bring possible new realities into being. The conference addresses the questions of how fictions are designed and how the multiplicity of possible new futures is negotiated and realized.

Design Fiction, Negotiating Futures October 28-30, 2010.

YouTube – The new PayPal iPhone app seems to use the Bump API to match up two physical gestures and make a payment. (I even like their tacky faux-anthropology video).

And Square has just announced their payment app for the iPad.

I’ve concluded that the promise of RFID was eclipsed by another technology out there that’s poised to become more and more disruptive, not only to RFID, but to a host of technologies, and that’s the CCD.

from CCD by Joe Gregorio. Via BERG.

Cameras might allow a photographer to record a scene and then alter the lighting or shift the point of view, or even insert fictitious objects.

from Computational Photography, American Scientist

The camera as a device you carry has completely disappeared. Image sensors have become part of the literal fabric of everyday life.

from What Photography Will Look Like By 2060

“Practising tomorrows? Ubiquitous computing and the politics of anticipation” a PhD by Sam Kinsley.

via Anne

“While Charles & Ray were frequently contracted by corporations like Polaroid, Westinghouse, and IBM, they never made films on demand. Nearly all their films represent a symbiotic relationship between the artist and the client, and they only made films when there was genuine interest. Witness Westinghouse ABC (1965), which is essentially a montage of the Westinghouse product line (note that the Westinghouse logo was designed by Paul Rand). Even here there is a spirited interest in the subject. In the film, Charles & Ray focus on the technology and typography at a break-neck tempo and transform what would otherwise be an incredibly dry subject into something rich and lively. Also, in SX-70 (1972), intended as a promotional film for the newly released Polaroid SX-70 camera, the Eames’ take advantage of the opportunity to discuss optics, transistors and to display their own polaroid photographs.

A good overview via The Films of Charles & Ray Eames.

Beautiful new exploratory game for the Nintendo DS, that uses the front-facing camera and face tracking to calculate a perspective that renders like a window on a new world.

DSi「立体かくし絵　アッタコレダ. Via BERG

Curious Displays by Julia Yu Tsao

Denisa Kera & Jimmy Loizeau: 18:46 in The Futurity Long Conversation.

Augmented (hyper)Reality by Keiichi Matsuda

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.

A competent visualisation of an undesirable future.

New Google ad: Parisian Love.

Below are some clippings of bits that seem particularly insightful:

It puts own embodiment at risk. And whomsoever can mitigate that risk while providing reward will probably do well. I believe that organizations such as Apple and Google see this and are pursuing not merely real-time, or hyper-local or crowd-sourced apps but ownership of the “view”.

...

Everybody wants a part of the lens of reality, the zero-click base layer beneath the beneath. As Gene Becker puts it “The World is the Platform”. And an ecosystem is starting to emerge.

...

Suddenly game developers are arguing with GIS experts and having to unify their very different ways of describing mirror worlds.

...

[I]nterfaces move from being heavy and solid with big heavy buttons and knobs and rotary dials to becoming liquid and effortless like the dynamic UI of the iPhone to becoming like air itself.

...

By making hidden things visible, and visible things cheap, it will make other things possible that we don’t entirely realize yet.

...

There will be user interface interaction issues. What will be the conventions for hand-swipes, grabs, drags, pulls and other operations to manipulate objects in our field of view.

...

[AR] is not simply “memory” – it isn’t just a mnemonic that helps bring understanding closer to the surface of consciousness. Clearly we are surrounded by our own memories, signage, advertising, radio, friends voices and an already rich complicated teeming natural landscape loaded with signifiers and cues. But it is another bridge between personal lived experience and the experience of others. It seems to lower costs of knowing, and it seems to provide stronger subjective filters.

...

Augmented Reality seems to at least offer the possibility that we can punch some holes in the boxes. It seems to offer a bridge between structure and chaos rather than just structure.

Things I’ve noticed today:

Lovely new exploratory homepage at Thinglink.

There is clearly a very well curated user-base at SVPPLY creating a continuous navigation of want.

Related: Social networks for things, Thingd, Allconsuming.

A visualization of private spaces in public photography. A design probe on digital mannerism by choy ka fai

Via BERG.

via Telling stories with interfaces « Snarkmarket.