designswarm thoughts

Off on xmas vacation at the end of the week, but super swamped, so I thought id make you something nice for Xmas, like a card : ) Will be back for my usual dose of sarcasm, scepticism and ranting towards the end of the year. Hope you all have lots to eat and drink with loving and loved ones!

(Don’t forget to wish me happy birthday on saturday though : )

As we’re approaching the end of this year and I’m trying to recap this rollercoaster of a year and went back to one of those corny questionnaires that a friend from Quebec sent me a few years ago and fill it out, it’s good for the karama people! Those who are brave enough can post theirs up in the comments if you dare!

1.What did you do in 2006 that you’d never done before?
Started freelancing
 
2. Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
 resolutions are so last century! My ADD prevents me from making any and keeping any as well.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
My friend Simon and Isabelle his wife had a baby, little Amy!

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Diane Bélanger, my former boss, and a wonderful immigration lawyer in montreal, woman and mother.
 
5. What countries did you visit?
Hungary, Romania, Switzerland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, UK, (woops, forgot Norway, France)

6. What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006?
Better health

7. What date from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory?
20th of July
 
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Graduating and finding work within a fortnight
 
9. What was your biggest failure?
Creating more bad karma with some people around me than i would have liked.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Yes 

11. What was the best thing you bought?
My Kennedy space centre tour bag.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
Al Gore for An Inconvenient truth

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Domus Academy’s closure of IDII.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Traveling 

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Working with great people on exciting projects!

16. What song/album will always remind you of 2007?
Body and Soul by Death Cab Cutie

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
More tired, busier, more confident of the future.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Sports

 19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Partying
 
20. How will you be spending Christmas?
Going to the UK.
 
21. Who did you spend the most time on the phone with?
Matt

22. Did you fall in love in 2006?
Yes
 
23. What was your favourite TV programme?
Scrubs
 
24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
No

26. What was the best book(s) you read?
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand but i haven’t finished it yet.
 
27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Iron & Wine
 
28. What did you want and get?
To be captain of my own boat.

29. What did you want and not get?
Prototype my thesis project

30. What were your favourite films of this year?
The Departed

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
It’s coming up, i’ll be spending it in London, turning 26.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Less drama

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2006?
Whatever fits in a suitcase

34. What kept you sane?
My family

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Don’t know any anymore…

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
Canadian elections
 
37. Who did you miss?
Caroline, Marc-André, Mylène

38. Who was the best new person you met?
Matt

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2006.
All things come to those who wait

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year?

drink up baby down
Are you in or are you out?
Leave your things behind
‘Cause it’s all going off without you
Excuse me too busy you’re writing your tragedy
These mishaps
You bubble-wrap
When you’ve no idea what you’re like

Ok so sue me I’m just too damn lazy to post up a picture of my real bike,but I’m really proud of my new (well second-hand) Gazelle bike which I bought last monday for way too much money. The lock was worth half the price of the bike but I am now still counting down the days till it gets stolen…

What Amsterdam gives, Amsterdam takes.

Canary Wharf dusk skyline

Originally uploaded by mbiddulph.

Some creatures hibernate till spring, refusing to face the cold of winter and preferring to stuff their face and sleep through it. I envy them. I guess I’ll be going through something similar because for the next 6 months i’ll actually stop traveling…

I took my last flight of 2006 today, making this my 15th relocation, my 16th flight this year, and after all this, impossible as it might seem, i’m on a break. So from now on till late spring, I’ll be exploring the dutch cultural landscape in much more depth and will hopefully also learn the language, on top of working hard for Blast Radius of course : )

Sigh, maybe i’m pushing it a little, but Dave and I started a new blog. So if you’re interested in food, weird food packaging, restaurant concepts, obesity, healthy food services, then go check it out!

Ok, so I’m sure this has been a little confusing for people to figure out where I am on any given week, but now it’ll be easy. As of next week, I am relocating to Amsterdam till late spring 2007. Hopefully I’ll find a cozy place of my own, I’m getting a bit tired of not having a place to buy plants for and decorate. So if you’re in that neck of the woods, come and say hi!

On my list of things to do: Make your own wearable workshop at Mediamatic, hunt for a flat, and buy a winter coat.

I’ll be going to Milan for the next 2 days, to meet an interesting company with whom I might collaborate. It will be very strange to go back to Milan post-idii, so many memories : /

Back on thursday with plenty of Flickr pictures : )

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 ; )

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.

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. .”

I am on vacation… which is another way to say i’m not working full time, which is another way of saying i’m looking for more work, which just means I’m bored. After just 2 days “off”, I’m getting antsy again, looking for the next thing. Somehow inactivity does not suit me well and I’m not sure that’s such a good thing. Normal people know how to snap out of it usually no?

Anyway, I’ve been thinking of what kind of work i want to get involved in and it’s very curious to find myself talking 2 different languages that don’t usually speak to each other… on one had there’s the product designer in me and on the other hand, the “web geek” part of me as well… how do i make these 2 parts of me converge? Somehow the market’s expectation of what i do as an “interaction designer” is only web-based… but i don’t have a hard-core web background… i am learning certainly but i could never claim to be able to properly code anything other than HTML sites at this point…i was described recently as a “creative architect” which i think is funni… corporate environment love to find a box for you and they still couldn’t fit me into one.

On the industrial design side, well i certainly have some experience and am now concentrating on my next product project for the Salone 2007, but i am not interested in designing a chair and considering that the highlight of my career… So what am i? What do i do?

Well i think i’m something of an interpreter, i can talk to people from various backgrounds and make a project come together. I can understand people’s skills and where they fit in a project. I’m not sure what that is: strategic designer? project manager? design researcher? any other non-descipt terms out there could apply really, but then i love to work on my own stuff… hmm…
Maybe i should just keep freelancing… or freefalling… that sounds more like it feels right now..

I hate tourists, i really do. Living in Amsterdam especially highlighted that trait in my already sporadically abrasive personality. I had to walk through the Dam every morning on my way to work and would hold my breath, as i whizzed past herds of lost tourists walking at the speed of a pot-induced crawl, looking around conveniently dazed and confused, not sure what they were supposed to look at in the first place. I would hear every language that i know (or can understand) on my way past them: italian, french, spanish, quebecer, french… it was a nightmare to go through that square with a friend as I would inevitably distracted from our conversation, my ears catching bit of pointless conversations. I hate tourists because I don’t think that a place is best lived this way, by buying the guidebook to it, going to the hotel everyone else goes to, buying the trinkets that are supposed to symbolize the culture you’ve just brushed past on your way to Mme Tussaud’s. I think that the best experience you can have of a culture is by pretending you live there.

I spent the weekend in Paris to see a good friend of mine who was on her way to Istanbul and had decided we were going to meet in Paris and chat. That’s exactly what we did. We walked and talked. We didn’t visit anything in particular as it was hardly our first trip to Paris (I lived there 11 years, she spent a few years there in the 60s and had visited several times), we walked around the Quartier Latin, Montparnasse, went to see a very bad Gerard Depardieu movie, ate the best food on the planet, drank way too much red wine and had lovely coffee and were generally very parisian. That, i think is the best way to experience a new city, by just bumping into things, letting the urban design guide you into an experience, something an ex-colleague of mine worked on for his thesis. Well that and great food always helps : )

So I’ve been thinking of redesigning my website to cater more to my freelancing career and thought I’d post this up to see what people thought. Basically I’m trying to make it more “swarmy” and this just might be the incentive I need to learn Flash (the oh so dreaded and essential tool in my field). I thought it might be nice to have different views: client, type of work, as a way to build a kind of “tag cloud” of activities so that people would have an idea of the type of work I get involved in (a lot of different things) and where my interests lie.

I had a fairly shocking meeting with a man who was supposedly interested in redesigning Youth centres in the UK. This sounded great to me especially because the landscape of childhood now, with the addition of technology, is very different from my own. Growing up in the 80s I only had contact with technology later on in life through my first walkman at age 11 maybe, my first computer at the age of 15 and was introduced to it through school computers when i was young, and then DOS and Windows 3.1 classes in Saudi Arabia. Ok so maybe i didnt have a classic childhood to begin with, but that’s not the point… : )

Now children have access to cell phones at age 6, a computer present in the house from birth, and they probably try to suck on an iPod shuffle once or twice…Age compression they call it in large toy companies, or the changes that children have gone through that make their traditional toys irrelevant more quickly, is an example of this change.

As children grow up, their social dynamics are now shaped by the tools they have: cell phones, texting, emails, chat, online communities such as MySpace (or Bebo in the UK) etc…

With all this in mind you would think that anyone attempting to redesign Youth Centres would be interested , even a little, in the ways that “growing up” have changed. You would also think that as an adult designer, you would want to have a very user-centrered design approach to that problem. Why aren’t joung kids using these youth centres. What is their perception of them. What so they seek elsewhere that the centre doesn’t provide? What would they like out of an urban structure that is supposedly catering to them? Those would be just a few of a miriad of quesions that one could ask kids of all ages. Wouldn’t this be the perfect way to make sure you’re not perpetrating the “patriarchal designer” model… the “i know best” model which has proven to fail and has led to the web-2.0-user-generated- content generation of applications to emerge?

But no. I sat there in Greenwitch park listening to a man who thinks that when designing youth centres “people don’t know what they want”, “children are not my client, society is my client”, “i dont understand the web”, “we need to work with experts in child development”, ” a child doesnt know what it needs to grow up properly”. I’m not saying that i disagree with all of what he was suggesting… but this is such a dangerous approach to take. It was like talking to a product designer who doesn’t know that people use his product. It was like going back in time and as i spoke to him about Fresh Start and experience prototyping, iterative design, etc… I saw how far removed I am from the normal world. I think I need to dumb things down these days for anyone outside of my field to understand me. I’m not sure what this means for me as a professional, but what I do know is that as Ezio Manzini (who I admire greatly) said :

“[Start with the premise that] people are smart” and what you will design with ultimately be better.

A few days ago, some of my ex-idii colleagues started an email back and forth about the general state of affairs in the US with a ridiculous dose of Canadian-envy. I hate these types of conversations. People like to think of Canada as a “sleeping giant” in my industry, generally though we’re usually thought of as nice and naive people… as if coming from a country where nature is part of our heritage and ladnscape made our IQ sink and our sensibility became something laughable. There’s nothing enviable about a country that only makes the news when sad events happen. There’s nothing enviable here…

Today, I wish i were home.