designswarm thoughts

This makes me think that people were right stuffing their savings under their mattress.

One day I will write about Montreal and Québec properly. Not now though.
I just came back from a fortnight among family and friends, mostly and rather unsuccessfully trying to stay away from the internets. It was interesting though to get a glimpse of other people’s internets. Most of my good friends are not from a tech or design background. They are in biology labs, students, lawyers, event organisation, show owners… Normal people you know. So it was strange that some of them didn’t have a cell phone but all of them had a Facebook account (something i no longer have thank god). When I told them I had a blog and posted my pictures online all the time, its like they didnt know what to do with that kind of information. RSS really needs to be explained to people better, because the walled garden that Facebook has created will make normal people think that’s all the internet has to offer in terms of self expression.

Another interesting experience was getting a 65 year old friend of mine to understand how to use Windows Vista….what can i say? FAIL!!!! I can imagine a plethora of new browsers starting to be developed for the elderly, because frankly, we young ones are used to living with a whole bunch of visual clutter we don’t need. But someone trying to come to grips with computers and the internet is really totally fracked.

So I thought I’d map out the interesting academic environments where one might find a course that relates in some way shape or form to interaction design in the broadest sense possible (notice there aren’t any web courses here). I’m interested in how these schools form the professionals of tomorrow and how the field will find it’s way on the overall market. I’ll evenutally try to do the same with the interaction design businesses.

Note that this map is publicly editable so if I’m missing something, do add to it!

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“The cupcake is a real symbol of femininity and a camp symbol of a bygone era,” says Shail. “People really respond to it and love it.” (Although, unfortunately, few people actually eat the cakes, because they tend to assume that they are poisoned or laced with drugs.)

via The Guardian

I’ve never in my life given that answer to that question. Am I the only one? I get the feeling this is an American perspective on the role of an interaction designer. Is it the only one? I hope not.
via core 77

This is a little project of mine that was born over a year ago in Amsterdam but went into hibernation for a while for obvious reasons. I’m happy to consider this is my first actual contribution to the web2.0 conversation.

I’d like to thank D’arcy Saum, Richard Groenendijk and Nicholas Land for helping me out on this project.

Constant Setting:

Communications technologies allow us to be connected globally but there is nothing more deeply moving than the natural and uncontrollable motion of the day. Every hour of the day, somewhere in the world, Mother Nature offers us that symphony of color, and we take pictures of it.

Constant setting is a simple website that displays in real time, any sunset images taken and posted to Flickr as creative commons that correspond to the cities where the sun is setting at the moment.

You can see the city where the image was taken (which you can click to be redirected to the Google maps location, if you don’t know where in the world that is) as well as its geographical information (long / lat) and the local time in that city.

You can also see who took the picture and get redirected to the original picture to add to your favorites! There’s a little timer to let you know how long to the next one, and because this is crowdsourced in a way, it might go back to the same image, until it finds an image tagged with “sunset” for the next location.

Enjoy and do let me know what you think! Consider this version1.0 :)

“An iPhone is a phone you can FUCKING PUT DOWN for five minutes in order to PAY ATTENTION to the people who are in the FUCKING ROOM WITH YOU”
From 2lmc.

Not interactive designer, all designers are interactive!

Lovely interview of Kars here, I think that conversation embodies the misunderstandings and challenges around the concept of “just enough prototyping” (mantra that Gillian Crampton Smith pushed at Ivrea) and the need to be dependent on technology when designing or be technology agnostic.

“I do not have the authority to obligate the government to make purchases.”

Images taken while sitting in Citizen Cupcake in front of the Apple Store in SFO.

Girl in the yellow shirt from Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino on Vimeo.

It’s August finally and as a form of relaxation, I’m forcing myself to do some video editing, something I used to enjoy tremendously when I was studying.

This one is for Karola.

What is jewellery? from Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino on Vimeo.

Matt put up a nice map of the startups in Shoreditch, glad we’re somehow web2.0 enough for that map :)

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I’m writing this, half thinking I should probably wait to leave the country.

Walking through Singapore, you cannot but wonder who really lives here. Impeccable streets (and I really mean impeccable, not a single piece of rubbish on any lawn or anywhere), very little public space or street benches, ads on the telly about parental planning, and an airconed shopping mall at every corner.

A friend of mine called it “the most american city in Asia” and I think that’s probably true in the 1984 sense of the word America.

The Wikipedia page is strangely absent of any political history section and Google reeks of not so happy reports on what the situation might be like and how people have been taught to feel about it. I met a few people this weekend who went to jail or had been arrested for what seemed like quite foolish reasons.

All slightly unsettling. I leave tomorrow evening.

It took me a while to digest Janne’s post on why ubicomp is a broken concept, mostly because on principal I tend to disagree. It’s also a bit in response to Tom Coates’s altered version of his talk with Matt Jones that he gave at Foocamp called “Personal Informatics”.

Firstly I think the starting point for thinking about ubiquitous spaces, objects etc is not necessarily that they are meant to be smarter, but perhaps more that they are meant to report better. Not smart, just less dumb :) Andy’s house is the obvious example of this. I think there is tremendous interest at the moment about being able to gather more efficiently stuff that is just lying around, invisible and not particularily useful. Innovation often comes from taking things we know and mashing them up with things we didn’t know we didn’t know. Someone pointed out the other day that we’re ultimately creeping towards AI with all these “clever” systems, but I think it might just be the reverse, we still hold the brain, we’ve just outsourced the synapses.

Also I think there are plenty of areas to think about in regards to the results of ubiquitous systems, information and data. One of the most important things, in my opinion has to do with evaluating the amount of behavioral or operational change based on the digestion and synthesis of all this data. It’s no use collecting the temperature and light levels inside a building if it isn’t with the aim to perfect your heating system or prevent collective seasonal depression for eg. Even on a personal basis, its no use me being able to monitor my heartrate everyday, because it only puts me in the “now”, an ephemeral place of thought and decision-making. One thing about technology, is that it tends to make people generally lazy about their levels of commitment. Perhaps we should push instead for the development of technologies and applications that encourage people to invest time and effort in an activity (think Honey we’re killing the kids).

Furthermore, what’s interesting about this idea of personal ubiquity is that some of it could possibly be shared online, so no longer relying on a sturdy and professional infrastructure other than the internet itself. Seeing people play around with Pachube and the Ethernet Arduino shield, makes things really exciting.

All in all I think the ubicomp ideas of the future will be more personal, more persuasive and lighter than what we’ve seen so far.