21.30
Originally uploaded by Ti.mo.
I just spent the weekend in Oslo at the wonderful Near-field workshop and thought I’d post up my list of places I would recommend to anyone dropping in town (most of this was because of Timo of course):
- The Sound of Mu a lovely club with lots of small screens in frames 
- Pascal a very nice restaurant with delicious cakes.
- Delicatessen a great tapas bar.
- Kunsternes hus a lovely restaurant for seafood.
- Freia is an awesome chocolate brand.
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“He (the artist) says studies back up his belief that slides can help combat stress and depression.”
It’s called fun! I don’t really think you need extensive research to prove that point.
Finally, after much procrastination, my thesis project is online. This is really not meant to be that academic really, but more of a pitch for the idea as such. Most of the thinking is in the paper I wrote, but everyone knows that people prefer pretty pictures ; )
I was looking through the list of people who will be attending the
Are we laughing at technology or is it laughing at us i wonder?
Pecha Kucha is coming up this fall in London on the 18th of October and on the 1st of December in Amsterdam and I feel incredibly temped to participate. For those of you who don’t know what this this, its a way for designers to talk about their work, network and meet potential clients as well potentially. Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.
I wonder what i would present though: either Stickychat, The Hungries (Alejandro is presenting them at the Bogota edition), or maybe Stint.
It’s a well known fact I have way too many Stickies which over the weekend I managed to reduce to 15 (i think i had at least double that) and found this lovely list of vegetables with the wittiest names.
Since I can always use a bit of typeface practice, I thought I’d do something more interesting that make a ta-da list out of it.
Is this a trend or the byproduct of the fact that most often than not, people can’t commit to defining their field? So now after my earlier rant about the RCA’s new name for it’s interaction design program, i read that former IDII Bill Moggridge is publishing a book called Designing interactions.
Sounds so artsy… “oh honey, i design interactions”
PS: I find it funny he took Bill Verplank’s diagrams for the cover of his book : )
Oh yes and let’s not forget Dan Saffer’s Design for interaction.
NordiCHI is coming up next week in Oslo and although I won’t make it to the conference (too expensive for my post-graduation budget at the moment ) I will make it to the Blogject workshop organized once more by Timo, Julian and Nicholas, after a first successful workshop at LIFT in Geneva last spring.
We’re supposed to put together 5 minute pitches in the form of 3 slides and a rant about what we do, what our position is and conclusions, but Timo has also asked me to do a longer 15 minutes presentation of my ideas in the afternoon. I’m really excited about presenting to my peers and getting a conversation going about the stuff that’s been eating away at me and lead to my thesis project. Now all i have to do is make it digestible for others : )
My position paper for the workshop was the following:
“This position paper will attempt to illustrate how the new paradigm of the “internet of things” will support a shift in thinking in users and professionals towards more responsible and sustainable practices and behaviors, using “Stint”, a service designed around a collectivity of connected objects.
If we dig a little further into the current trend of the “experience economy” and PSS (UNEP) i.e. a product service society, we are encouraged to address sustainability by encouraging people to seek value from what they have access to and not what they own. On the opposite end of the spectrum however, mass customization and rapid prototyping are also on the rise as business practices follow the user-generated trend. Easy access to material goods, however personalized they might be, might lead to what one might call “moral hazard” (Reid J. Lifset, 2005) as our thirst for new and exciting products and material-based experiences have increased tenfold (J.Chapman, 2005). The semantics of objects is lost and disposal is easier because ownership is no longer valuable. This is where connected objects might play an important part.
“The internet of things” seeks to illustrate the value of connectivity and ubiquitous computing by tagging and keeping track of our surrounding everyday objects. This will become relevant in the objects we will design in the future. This means that a layer of retrievable, virtual and linkable meaning can be associated to any given object and as designers we might start to consider objects as part of an eco-system, a collective, a society of objects. This might in turn address how we design such objects and the interactions we have with them. What are a user’s expectations of a connected object and it’s capabilities? Would the use of an object change when it is semantic understood as belonging to a family? In the case of “Stint”, that question was addressed and offered one of many solutions.
Stint is a music sharing service made of physical tokens that link to people’s music. The way that a person collects and interacts with those tokens is communicated to a widget that also talks to the main music application online. Each physical object links to someone’s musical donations. A typical user would therefore collect all these tokens as representations and physical links to the music that each person would send them, in real time. To have access to that music as it reaches each token the user has to push each one. This physical connection with the object itself allows the system to record and track what content is accessed, but also allows the object to take an active part in the system. As time goes by each stint will get used and show who are the people whose collection that person has interacted most with. Inversely she will be able to identify if her friends are listening to her music by looking at their objects or their virtual and connected counterparts.
In this case study, the connected objects were treated in such a way as to physically show and display the use which matched the data being collected. The design approach goes far beyond what is traditionally considered product design (ergonomics, aesthetics, industrial processes) but starts to scratch the surface of new ways in which practitioners could use technology to infuse life and meaning into objects that make people want to build relationships with them that are more meaningful and rich than what is currently available. A new set of behaviors and semantics will change people’s understanding of the material world and eventually change their consumption habits as each object’s history becomes as precious as the object itself.
In conclusion we can expect to see a change in the practice of product design as connected objects become more popular. The interconnectedness of physical elements is bound to play a part in how we will design the behaviors and interactions they will have with each other , with their users and between users.
References:
Chapman, Jonathan. Emotionally Durable Design – Objects, Experiences & Empathy, Earthscan ed., London, 2005.
Manzini, Ezio. Jégou, Francois. Sustainable everyday, scenarios of urban life, Edizioni Ambiente, Italy, 2003.
“UNEP and Product Service Systems.” UNEP. Jan 2005. United Nations Environmental program.
Hanging out in London cafés as i am these days, i often position myself next to windows (whenever i’m in buses, i always somehow unconsciously end up next to the emergency exit windows but that’s another story) and find myself staring out and observing how people interact with their surroundings. I’ve started noticing the way that people use architecture for flirtatious reasons or as a way to play out dramatic events of their personal lives… for example:
1. Sitting in the bus, I saw a young 20-something couple crouched at the foot of 2 marble columns, each of them sitting in that little space that somehow became suddenly private having one of those “we need to talk” conversations. The woman was lecturing while the young man was staring at his feet.
2. Sitting in Starbucks at Bishopsgate, where i can usually be found, I was staring out onto the huge office building in front. Every woman that would come out to smoke would ultimately turn to the glass-plated windows and stare at themselves as in a mirror in that “do i look fat in this?” kind-of-way, oblivious to what was going on around them.
3. Waiting for the train last week, I observed as a woman talking on her cell phone on the platform opposite me, in a business suit, leaned head first on the brick wall in front of her, shielding herself from being heard i guess, for about 15 minutes. It was almost like a praying position that the Jewish take on the Wall of Complaints in Jerusalem…
People, architecture, technology, all intertwine.
