designswarm thoughts

Just when I thought the world couldn’t get any more bizarre, I found Women Unlimited and my day just took a completely different turn. I realised that media used to treat women and men like this and felt much better about our present day situation, even with Sarah Palin around, because now at least we’re able to identify these sorts of hypocritical attitudes. Bear in mind this was published by Penguin in 1997.

The back cover reads: “Women Unlimited demystifies daily life to save you time, money and stress. The style is simple and concise, with diagrams and illustrations throughout.”

On Wednesday I’ll be in Berlin for my keynote (yikes!!) at Web2.0 Expo Berlin and on Thursday I’ll be in Amsterdam to speak about hybrid toys at Mediamatic. If anyone is up for drinks, dinner, coffee, whatever…ping me! I love both cities and unfortunately don’t get to spend enough time there, so would be great to see you!

I just came back from the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium 2008in Seattle which in the end I enjoyed enormously. I say in the end, because at the beginning I didn’t get it. This is only my second American conference and I’m learning that the flavor of these kinds of events is definitely different in Europe. I think I got it though.

The key difference is: the content doesn’t matter, the people do. In Europe, its definitely about what the theme is, what people say, if they’re smart or not, if things said are innovative or not etc. The content will act as a starter for conversations. In the US, its not that the content doesn’t matter, but it’s not necessarily the key focus or starting point to a good conversation. During the entire 2 days, people were on the backchannel commenting, bitching and connecting while someone presented. It sometimes felt like noone was listening. I was stupid enough not to join, I might have met more interesting people that way.

In anycase, content-wise here are some remarks:

- Social Objects revisited talk by Jyri was fantastic.
- It’s interesting to see the expression “social objects” be taken literally by “the internet of things” crowd. Much like “product design”, it shows that material-based metaphors are still handy even when you work on the web.
- Second Life is dead to most designers and geeks but very much alive for most researchers and academics
- 18 year olds in wealthy neighbourhoods are as scary and dependent on technology as we are.
- Jesse Alexander has the best job in the world
- Location-based services haven’t gotten any more exciting for me, I’m still waiting for the killer app.
- Academics have their own secret language and it was interesting to dive into that world for 2 days.

All in all thanks to Tom for inviting me and being generally wonderful and supportive, Liz Lawley for organising this fabulous event and Gwendolyn Flowd for the fantastic conversations.

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 web. 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, shop 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.