Three films on communication and networks
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.
Negotiating futures. Design fiction
Swiss Design Network Conference 2010:
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.
CCD and computational photography
A few links on imaging and computation:
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.
Augmentia
Anselm lays out the emerging issues with Augmented Reality (AR). In doing so he relates it to a whole host of known and unknown problems associated with ubiquitous computing, semantic publishing and data platforms.
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”.
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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.
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Suddenly game developers are arguing with GIS experts and having to unify their very different ways of describing mirror worlds.
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[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.
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By making hidden things visible, and visible things cheap, it will make other things possible that we don’t entirely realize yet.
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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.
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[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.
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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.
Telling stories with interfaces
“But where does it go from here? Is this really just a micro-genre best suited to ads for internet companies? Or does the fact that we spend so much time on this stage our selves mean that it really can be the venue for more (and more kinds of) storytelling?
Embodied interaction in music
I too have ditched my large iPod for the iPod Shuffle, finding that I love the white-knuckle ride of random listening. But that doesn’t exclude the need for a better small-screen-based music experience.
The pseudo-analogue interface of the iPod clickwheel doesn’t cut it. It can be difficult to control when accessing huge alphabetically ordered lists, and the acceleration or inertia of the view can be really frustrating. The combinations of interactions: clicking into deeper lists, scrolling, clicking deeper, turn into long and tortuous experiences if you are engaged in any simultaneous activity. Plus its difficult to use through clothing, or with gloves.
Music and language
My first thought was something Jack and I discussed a long time ago, using a phone keypad to type the first few letters of a artist, album or genre and seeing the results in real-time, much like iTunes does on a desktop. I find myself using this a lot in iTunes rather than browsing lists.
Predictive text input would be very effective here, when limited to the dictionary of your own music library. (I wonder if QIX search would do this for a music library on a mobile?)
Maybe now is the time to look at this as we see mobile phone music convergence.
h3. Navigating through movement
Since scrolling is inevitable to some degree, even within fine search results, what about using simple movement or tilt to control the search results? One of the problems with using movement for input is context: when is movement intended? And when is movement the result of walking or a bump in the road?
One solution could be a “squeeze and shake” quasi-mode: squeezing the device puts it into a receptive state.
Another could be more reliance on the 3 axes of tilt, which are less sensitive to larger movements of walking or transport.
Gestures
I’m not sure about gestural interfaces, most of the prototypes I have seen are difficult to learn, and require a certain level of performativity that I’m not sure everyone wants to be doing in public space. But having accelerometers inside these devices should, and would, allow for the hacking together other personal, adaptive gestural interfaces that would perhaps access higher level functions of the device.
One gesture I think could be simple and effective would be covering the ear to switch tracks. To try this out we could add a light or capacitive touch sensor to each earbud.
With this I think we would have trouble with interference from other objects, like resting the head against a wall. But there’s something nicely personal and intimate about putting the hand next to the ear, as if to listen more intently.
More knobs
Things that are truly analogue, like volume and time, should be mapped to analogue controls. I think one of the greatest unexplored areas in digital music is real-time audio-scrubbing, currently not well supported on any device, probably because of technical constraints. But scrubbing through an entire album, with a directly mapped input, would be a great way of finding the track you wanted.
Research projects like the DJammer are starting to look at this, specifically for DJs. But since music is inherently time-based there is more work to be done here for everyday players and devices. Let’s skip the interaction design habits we’ve learnt from the CD era and go back to vinyl :)
Evolution of the display
Where displays are required, I hope we can be free of small, fuzzy, low-contrast LCDs. With new displays being printable on paper, textiles and other surfaces there’s the possibility of improving the usability, readability and “glanceability” of the display.
We are beginning to see signs of this with this OLED display on this Sony Network Walkman where the display is under the surface of the product material, without a separate “glass” area.
For the white surface of an iPod, the high-contrast, paper-like surfaces of technologies like e-ink would make great, highly readable displays.
Prototyping
So I really need to get prototyping with accelerometers and display technologies, to understand simple movement and gesture in navigating music libraries. There are other questions to answer: I’m wondering if using movement to scroll through search results would create the appearance of a large screen space, through the lens of a small screen. As with bumptunes, I think many more opportunities will emerge as we make these things.
More reading
Designing for Shuffling
Thoughts on the iPod Shuffle
Bumptunes
Audioclouds/gestural interaction
Sound objects
DJammer
On the body
Runster
Art + communication 2004
Even and I presented our Timeland project during the 3 day conference and exhibition.
I have made a large photo set at Flickr, and we have been using the tag art+communication for collaborative documentation.
The highlight of the event was a trip to Limbazi, for the opening of Piens the “milk” project, looking at the personal stories around the mapping of milk routes through the EU. It was really good to see GPS being used as a storytelling tool, a way of opening up personal stories in the documentary process.
A big thankyou to the RIXC lot, and everyone involved.
ISEA 2004 conference
There’s a really good writeup of the installations and artwork at Grandtextauto.
Photos
Mobile outskirts workshop
There is a workshop wiki and media archive that we are attempting to keep updated via fairly limited wireless coverage.
A painless and creative 15 hour bus drive took us from Trondheim up to the islands of Lofoten, in a bus full of GPS receivers, cameras and impromptu artworks.
Outside In
Outside In is a forum for involving new voices, media and practices in a discourse about the use and design of public space. It took place from 14 – 15 June 2004.
Roda Sten is amazing, below a suspension bridge, with huge concrete creations. Really windy, but calm inside the lecture space. Here are my notes and a few pictures.
Day 1
Session 2: Hacking the streets (I missed the 1st workshop)
Space Hijackers
- Putting memories in spaces: spaces arent the same after having been disrupted. after ‘reclaim the streets’ or a ‘circle line party’ you can’t see the space in the same way.
- Distinction between public and private. What is it?
- Public space doesn’t exist anymore.
- Ken’s new city hall is half private half public (private investment was involved in the building, so protests cannot happen outside)
- Do we need institutions in order to do events, is that the only way to do it legally?
- What’s stopping people from doing these things is not necessarily capitalism, but the fear of looking like a pillock: self-regulation is a big factor. Can spark things to let down inhibitions or shackles. Uses example of the scooter, became a kids toy and then it wasn’t cool anymore.
- What’s the connection between anarchism and these spontaneous events. Emergent order is interesting, so much control over actions, and the ways people move through the city. How does this relate to anarchy? Is this anarchy?
Zevs
- The city is a workshop: not just walls to tag
- Shadows of urban furniture: really good
- Visual kidknapping: Lavazza woman gets cut out of the frame
- Big poster with bleeding eyes
- Uses a high pressure water jet to clean the city, but also write at the same time.
- Digs at the notion of authorship, a site where people find work on the streets
- The work is anonymous, but there is the projection of authorial control behind it, its individual and definitely authored
- Would be interesting to explore more about Graffiti authorship: how do public artists want to be recognised?
- Managing the mystique around the work and the author.
- Difference between author/instigator
- Interview
- Visual kidknapping
3D bombing: Akim
- Polystyrene models, matched to fit specific city spaces
- City of names: what if the writers are the ones who build the houses?
Day 2
Session 3: Network experience
Jonah Brucker Cohen
- Wants to deconstruct network context
- Context: physical and social situation in which computation sits
- How does the network affect the output and experience
- Companies are claiming ownership of space because of signal
- WiFihog: saps out all wifi bandwidth
- LAN party versus Flash Mob
- Simpletext: collaborative sms image searching on large screens
- re-mapping and changing the context of interfaces: what about
- Simpletext project: assigns an image search to inputted text
- Steven Levy quote on hackers
Katherine Moriwaki
- Altering space by altering the body
- character of a space
- remnants of things, people, individuals
strength: strengthening signals to drown out free competion
shifting consequences: changing the input/output relationship.
messages, and displays via jitter/max on a large screen.
- put magnets on wrists and fingers and bodies to reveal the proximity of electronic devices: unexpected connections to other people and lampposts. Nice.
Data Climates: Pedro Seplveda Sandoval
- Living in a scanscape city
- electronic space, synthetic city
- Congestion charge as walled city, in electronic space
- London: highest density of cctv in the world
- will we decide to travel to areas based on the quality of electronic space
- A new architectural language for electronic space
- Houses without windows, just cameras. Can start to control life inside. Can also choose to use the weather channel as windows
- Pay a fee for personal surveillance: ask them to watch you all the way to the supermarket.
- The city of Yokohama was brought down by the coming of age party for 40,000 teenagers: the networks were overloaded with messages, because the teenagers didn’t want to talk face to face.
- Palm trees as cell towers (seen in south africa)
- Looked at a community in Hackney that were campaigning to not have a cell phone tower.
- Designed a house for them that would shield them from the signals, but they would have to give up cell phone connectivity. Designed it so that windows would open and close based on calls being made, or would give them 10 minute windows in which to make calls every 2 hours.
- Digital shelter: stand inside the line
Round up
- These presentations all use the strategy of showing ‘hypothetical products’ that are really non-products. They are doing this, rather than providing platforms or design methodologies, or distributing resources and infrastructures for people to design their own systems. I understand the need for designers as visionaries, but this could be made more valuable and useful.
- specialists in electronic space could be similar to lighting design specialists in the ‘70s. Will grow into a general field of understanding.
- Platforms and inftrastructure for technology is beyond architects, but understanding of the use and consequences is really important.
Session 4
Jocko Weyland
- Skateboarding as adaptive design: difference between skate parks and the street, skate parks become designed over time to mimic certain aspects of streets, but also according to innate, human skaters needs. A combination of factors go into making a good skateboarding space: free, alcohol, quality, location.
Swoon
- New to NY: wanted to work outside gallery space, was inspired by collage of city streets. Not from a graffiti background, being a female, can do certain things outside the norms of graffiti.
- Changes billboards during the day, looks official.
- Open democratic visual space
- a visual direct democracy…
- Cuba used to have street art as a means of free expression, but outlawed by dictatorship
- Makes lightboxes with imagined cities, and mounts on the reverse side of construction site walls, with peepholes ‘peer here’
- Interesting mix of opportunism and ‘designed intervention’
- Sometimes driven purely by visual interest.
Michael Rakowitz
- Mike Davis: Public is phantom
- Bedouin as a model of sustainable nomadic communities
- Homeless use waste air from air conditioning (airvac exhaust ports) to stay warm and dry
- Homeless have receded to the peripheral vision of the public. Want to see and be seen.
- Seeing is important for living nomadically in the city.
- Started to map the heat and the power of the exhaust fans in the city. Found a high one at MIT plasma lab.
- Re-routed smell from from a bakery to an art gallery, to subvert a ‘high art’ re-appropriation of space
Workshop ‘Loop City’
- Dietmar Offenhuber & Sara Hodges
- Showed Rybczynski’s film New Book using 9 frames: a good way of mapping space in the city. Starts off and the viewer is not sure if each frame is occurring synchronously, or in the same space, but a bus passes between all of the frames and the spatial link is made immediately. There is also a point where a plane flies overhead and all the actors look up: showing time synchronicity too.
Looking at the city
- as a set of repeated actions
- as a playground: situationists
- as a balance of social as well as physical architectures
Notcon 04
Barcodes for spatial markup and control
Spotcodes use a very simple circular barcode, to mark objects for interaction with a camera equipped phone.
- Requires a small application running on a Series 60 phone to scan barcodes with the built in camera
- Each barcode can currently store 42 bits of data using technology modified from iris tracking and wavelet technologies (as far as I understood)
- Potential for more data by increasing the number of rings, but current setup is a compromise for low quality cameraphone cameras
- The mobile phone application can determine position of phone relative to barcode by the elliptical distortion of the circle, could perhaps be used for quite accurate tracking with multiple spots
- The phone application communicates via bluetooth or gprs, using the barcodes as triggers for interactions
- It’s coded ‘close to the hardware’ to use the video input to do barcode calculation in realtime: Java/Symbian apps don’t have an API to realtime video input
- In use commercially via Bango
Bluetooth mapping
Reverend Rat demoed his 10 Watt bluetooth receiver, 10 times more powerful than a 35 mile 802.11b receiver, and 100 times more powerful than a Bluetooth dongle.
Not particularly interesting in itself, but using it from a high vantage point he might be able to map out usage patterns in urban areas, or track the flow of people and devices.
Some photos
Nice impromptu public markup
Inside
Outside
Anil demonstrates test barcodes for spotcode
Reverend Rat discovers Bluetooth devices
Celia and Rod
Geeks