“Caring from a distance”
The tagline for a telecare (read remote care for the elderly) conference last year. Somehow doesn’t quite get the point across.
Archive for March, 2008
Green restrictions
March 30, 2008For a number of reasons, I was looking into cutting my Brussels visit short by a few days. Looked up on my 2 non-favorite super cheap airlines only to find that a flight from Brussels to London does not exist.
That’s the first time a travel resctriction made me think “thank god!”. So I’ll just stay put and enjoy the mussels instead of wasting 10 times my weight in carbon.
Dark ages anyone?
March 30, 2008Seperate random conversations with Pix and Rob and finishing up my Baudrillard book have put me in a philosophical mood, not sure what it all means for now, but thought I’d make a public note of it.
FIRST: Heard through Twitter of this Muxtape phenomenon, essentially using our favorite tool, the internet, to once again try to time travel back to days of slower technology. The sound of rewinding back to your favorite song, exchanging tapes, losing them, breaking them and having to wind them back together with pencils (you know what i’m talking about i’m sure) were probably not elements that any of the designers of tapes thought would become associate with such a small and technical object.
THEREFORE: Rhetoric question: are we entering a kind of cultural “dark age” characterised by “a lack of contemporary written history, general demographic decline, limited building activity and material cultural achievements in general, a time of ignorance and superstition”? You have to wonder about the kids who are internet-native and whether they will learn to question it, hack it, patch it back together and accept it’s faults understanding that this isn’t the end all be all of their world but also humbly, just technology made of wires, capacitors, pcbs, etc.
EVEN THOUGH: I know a lot of programmers started learning about computers while still quite young programing on the BBC Micro perhaps, but for the rest of us, computers were for computer class and usually involved telling a little turtle where to go. The phone was something you used to call your friends after school while listening to the radio and gossiping, getting scolded by your parents for keeping the line busy. Days of friction, when technology was a small part of our daily landscape.
WHICH MEANS: Maybe i’m being a little too philosophical and suffering from a really early form of “back in my days”, but there might be something to be said for a generation like mine that grew up with things that didnt quite work that well: broken tapes, clunky walkmans, personal diaries, passing notes in class, and making paper airplanes. What happens in a world of seamlessness and where things rarely stop working? Does anyone learn to live without them? Do we stop questioning that they even exist because they are so effective and we forget that they are there at all? Stuff that of course governments and policy makers are thinking about specifically in relation to privacy online but I think it extends further into a global understanding of technology or daily assumptions about technology.
Sometimes it feels that progress was a little too fast to come and Gen X and Mtv is still not totally ready for it but that “Generation whatever is on youtube” might never learn to question it and wonders how we ever managed before all of this happened.
Stuff
March 27, 2008
As a “frequent traveller” I really enjoy work that rethinks our relationships to maps and geography. I wish I could wear my trips on sleeves sometimes as it would help avoid the very long drawn conversation I need to have with people to explain why I love Europe so much and that the only North American thing about me is my accent.
Lovely work by Elisabeth Lecourt.
One line service design
March 27, 2008Got tagged by Marc of 31volts so here goes. This is how I would characterise service design:
Getting a meal at MacDonald’s, getting a weekly vegetable delivery from Abel and Cole, ordering chinese takeout, going on your weekly supermarket run, getting your lunch from the office canteen, all the same thing, but not the same at all.
Qu'est-ce que le design aujourd'hui?
March 22, 2008
Got this from god knows where, but thought I’d let Montrealers know about this evening next week.
Just coz I really have too little to do
March 21, 2008Thoughts on everyday and far-away technologies
March 20, 2008I’ve finally found some time to have a proper read through Baudrillard’s System of objects to find it really is shaping my thinking around material culture and technology. Some quick thoughts based on quotes from the book:
“No sooner does an object lose its concrete practical aspects than it is transferred to the realm of mental practices”.
This made me think today about my first mentor if I can call him so. Hywel Jeffcott was my DTC teacher when I was 14-16 and the first one to truly encourage me to go into design. He gave me, on graduating from Year 11, a fabulous book I ended up endlessly flipping through called The Way things work by David Macauley. I think in a way the work I am doing with Tinker tries to somehow get back to the idea that innovation and technology are also palpable things that can be understood down to simple components. Simple components, simple actions that exist within the real of direct application are part of an art and a craft that in design is left to “fabricators”.
“Man has to be reassured by some sense of participation, albeit a merely formal one”
I think there’s much to be said about the fear that technology will take over. Baudrillard highlights an inconsistency in our thinking where we want technology to be as human as possible but if a sense of agency is too present (such as in articifial intelligence) then a line has been crossed which fills us with apocalyptic fears. We want so much for this technology to know about us and our needs, but not _that_ much. Where this line lies depends almost entirely on context of application, which means it isn’t policed and all sorts of privacy issues and concerns arise. It’s what he calls the “new anthropomorphism”.
“No man’s land between workplace and family home” is a metaphor that Baudrillard applies to the automobile. I think it can almost potentially extend to the cell phone. A personal object that is used so publicly and bridges space and time.
In any case, I truly recommend it as compulsory reading for designers. It is full of insights and questions about the great illusion we are creating and the mechanisms and motivations that work just under the surface of our everyday life.
Pecha Kucha Brussels talk
March 20, 2008
I’ve included my slides here. I basically tried to make a case on why electronics, hardware hacking and physical computing was in general an area that designers should be interested in. Not sure it was the right crowd for it, but then you never know.
Not quite there
March 17, 2008I’m trying to tie loose ends before I go spend 2 weeks working with the wonderful people at fo.am in Brussels. Yes grant you it’s not very far, but I really need to step out of London once in a while, to remind myself that the rest of world doesn’t live this frantically.
While I’m there I’ll be the first speaker at Pecha Kucha Brussels where I’ll be talking through a presentation entitled: “Or how I stopped worrying and learnt to love electronics”, about the work we do at Tinker and what I think it means for designers.
If you’re in the area, do ping!
