“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.
For 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.
Seperate 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.
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.
Got 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.
Got this from god knows where, but thought I’d let Montrealers know about this evening next week.
I’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.
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.
I’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!
Ok so del.icio.us sucks right now.
After sending them 3 support emails and no reply or help whatsoever, I’ve decided to suspend my daily automated posting and go for a sidebar posting instead. Yes I know most people don’t actually visit my site and RSS is king, but I can’t stand this anymore and I’m pretty sure it annoys you guys as well…
Grumble, I hope they wake up or I’ll look into other automated bookmarking options…
You’d have to be in the coma this past week not to have noticed that half the universe is in Austin for what feels like a geek version of prom night.
It’s also in times like these that it feels more lonely on the web in a way, as most of the people who don’t get a chance to meet get to spend a week together while the rest of us are spectators of that time and enjoyment. It’s a strange feeling of being at the end of the network, where it really feels like you’re a voyeur, desperately reaching out for anything people will share: pictures on Flickr, tweets, blog posts, etc.
Or maybe I should get out more :)
Just a quick announcement that I have switched to Feedburner for this blog’s RSS feed…subscribe away!
(Disclaimer: My company Tinker.it was sponsoring this event)
Few events in London care about defining interaction design like thishappend does. It’s third edition took place last Tuesday at the Roxy Bar near London Bridge and in a matter of an hour or so really framed the current challenges the field faces in industry.
First and foremost thishappened is an opportunity for interaction designers to leave their laptops and post-its behind, have a drink and a good chat with each other as there are few other “industry events” (this one sold out in 2 hours) and only that in itself is extremely valuable.
Jussi Ängeslevä, Schulze & Webb, Kenichi Okada and Snug & Outdoor had been invited to speak about a project, it’s challenges and the lessons learnt, a format we don’t see enough and that allows for much reflection on the design process. What I found great in this edition is that each presenter ended up talking about a different aspect of the project and creative experience.
1. The problem with remote projects is…
Jussi started the evening by talking about Art+Com’s project Duality an interactive walkway surrounded by water which, when someone would walk on it, would display ripples of light that would then extend out to create real ripples in the water. This sounds fairly straightforward, but the project was entirely conducted between their Berlin office and Tokyo, through a myriad of emails, testing by the japanese team on the other end, exchange of videos to see if the theory was proving right or wrong. Sounds tedious no? I asked Jussi if he had found there were any additional cultural issues in overseing the project, he talked about the fact that the Japanese were always quite keen to say everything was alright, and not talk about having any issues, until the very last minute. Lessons were certainly learnt in this process and it was great to get to hear it first hand.
2. Design in R&D
Jack was up next to talk about Olinda the social radio project for the BBC. It was a lovely and simple presentation of their challenge in mashing up an online concept of sociability into an everyday object. Coming from a typography background, I could see why he made some of his aesthetic choices. I also think this presented the array of challenges that face you when the outcome of a project is something you’re not entirely familiar with (even if the thought process is) : the learning curve, the time you take in understanding the implications of your design, the way in which your design decisions impact the use of an object, are all part of a challenge that presents itself when you are master and commander of the project. It’s also something that rarely happens in commercial projects in equally large companies like the BBC as those challenges would be broken down into tasks that would be divided up among “specialists” and glued together by project management. ugh. I think a lot of people in the room felt envious of Jack and Matt’s freedom.
3. The utopia of design schools
A similar freedom can be found in design schools. As Kenichi presented his project Animal Superpowers I was having flashbacks of Ivrea. Quick, efficient, with no sleep and little food and no money, the best ideas are often created, prototyped and presented in no time at all. The resources are part of the school’s infrastructure and materials available everywhere. The deadline of the work-in-progress show allows him and Chris to present one of the most successful pieces of their course. The caveat was subtle though, as they struggled to find children to use their capacity-enhancing toys, and showed a picture where Kenichi was pretending to be one of the kids. I can totally relate to that struggle, as designing for children can be one of the most elating activities and at the same time full of restrictions and limitations. When you’re doing a quick project user research is the least of your worries.
4. Implementing is awesome
Access to children wasn’t a problem for Hattie, who presented a great documentation of Snug and Outdoor’s work on London playgrounds. It was great to hear that they had been thinking about undirected and open play way before the topic was an internet meme. Although they label themselves as artists, their approach is a user-centered one and captured everyone’s imagination by demonstrating the different prototypes they had designed and tried on children. This eventually led them to receive NESTA funding and manufacture the Snug Kit. I overheard someone say “Why couldn’t they have just used trees and grass instead. What’s the point?” and to that I reply: show me a school with a playground that isn’t made of concrete. Their challenge was in dealing with the existing social infrastructures that children build in the schools of today not the landscape design.
The fact that the project was tested, changed, accepted, and manufactured made most people in the room clearly envious. The creative process in interaction design can often feel limited to one-off events, screen-based interactions and generally projects that are very “precious” and need tending, so seeing real products being made with the kind of creative independence and scope that Hattie and her partner had was a breath of fresh air.
This crescendo concluded the official part of the event which turned into a mixer of 60 or so people having drinks, catching up and perhaps talking about where it is all going.
In anycase, I look forward to the next edition in June and hope you’ll join me too.
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