designswarm thoughts

I’m one of those people who, in order to thoroughly enjoy a book, underlines my way through it. I re-read this one in the last month and thought i’d write things down down. They won’t make much sense outside of the context of the book and maybe that’s what’s interesting to a certain extent. I’ve started thinking that privacy and identity is actually very easy to hide once the general context has been lost.

For you, dear readers, these will be bits of sentences which I am sharing, not because I know you’ll understand them, but because I know you won’t ;)

page 30:
“Mais des tas de fois c’est comme ca, et presque tout le temps: on découvre à la fin que la souffrance, toute cette souffrance-là, était inutile, on a souffert comme des betes et c’était inutile, ca n’était ni juste ni injuste, ni bete, ni moche, c’était simplement inutile, et tout ce que tu peux dire à la fin c’est ca: c’était une souffrance inutile”

page 140
“peindre le rien”

page 153
“s’il y avait une solution une femme la découvrirait, ne serait-ce que par une complicité objective entre enigmes”

page 180
“ou tu regardes, ou tu joues”

page 219
“C’était un mélange de force indiscutable et de solitude définitive. Il les mettait à l’abri de toutes les défaites, et de tous les bonheurs. Ainsi ils perdaient, invaincus, toute leur vie.”

page 232
“Car c’est exactement ainsi qu’apparait la position destinale de l’homme: etre face au monde, avec soi-meme dans le dos.”

page 334
“la cruauté c’est la vertu par excellence des médiocres”

page 476
“la belle époque: on mangeait bien et les heures passaient vite”

I’m at the end of my present project and looking forward to some down time, looking for more opportunities in London as usual, but mostly getting back to blogging and keeping up with the world in general. I saw and ordered a set of tiny cards from the very sweet MOO project (reminded me of the conversation on the esthetics of cute actually) and I thought that it was interesting to see printing start up again in the world of photography, when the greats have kind of given up in favor of digital technologies. I think there’s a definite link here to my thesis in the way that the physicality of things affords so many interactions and as the fine people at Moo say about the internet:

“You can’t touch it, write on it, or put it on the mantle, you can’t hang it on the wall or pass it to the cute guy on the bus, you certainly can’t give it to your mom for her birthday.
We want to change this.
So we dream up new products, made up from stuff on the web, that help folks take their virtual lives offline. We hope you like them. ”

Funni how things change…

So because of feedback during the exam, i decided to sign up for Last.fm and see what all the fuss is about.

Good things:
1- Interesting ways to surf for music and good indication of the popularity of a song
2- I like the simplicity of the interface and browsing through the different elements of the “service” if one can really call it that, i’m not sure at this point.
3- Kind of a direct way to buy music, not so dissimilar to iTunes
4- I like the friends/neighbours category.

Elements that might need improvement:
1- How on earth do you find someone with your tastes??? Very hard to properly browse for users although each user has an interesting profile. i think that this is the feature that lacks the most innovation for tis service. It’s also extremely anonymous in the visual display of users, no sense of where users are from, and can one really look for someone based on location? isn’t the great thing about music to be able to hook up with people who share your interests and not your location?

I think that i am definitely no interested in making this service i am developing a way for people to browse other users as a main element. I am much more interested in displaying and developing a platform for music exchange that documents use and history of the listening habits, catering to small communities of people who know each other, are flirting, are using music as a way to discover what they are about. This, i think is the best way to discover someone and be introduced to new music.

“A new study reveals that we make our music purchases based partly on our perceived preferences of others.”

From aLive Science article

Happy New Year everyone!

Ok so back on track with my thesis at the moment. Ive decided to concentrate on MP3 players as i see the variety of ways in which people are targeted to buy this or that “music box” , which is what it is in a way. Its only a box and is there something more meaningful to be done? Make people care about that object? Can that object become a connector to others, be it virtually or in real life? These are the thoughts im having around this subject at the moment…

And to kick off things i found this Mobile Community Design article on a few things that the iPod is not doing which i will try to adress on my thesis.

“Music is a shared resource. Bands record their own music and then trade it. People lend CDs to other people to listen to for a while. People recommend music to other people. People make bootlegs and then buy the original if they like it. How does the IPod support this? It doesn’t. It puts barriers in the way of it. Ever try finding a song on your IPod using a standard Windows interface? All the music is obfuscated into meaningless numbered folders. Copying music between IPods via a cable (much less wirelessly) isn’t supported. You might say that this is because of copyright issues. Then what about the IPod Photo? I take my own pictures, save them, and then want to share them. I can’t even connect the IPod to a friend’s computer and easily give them a copy of my latest travel photos. It is completely unusable due to the folder structure being used. This isn’t about copyright, it’s about the designers not understanding the social nature of handheld devices that hold personal data. These devices are about social networks and sharing. While we’re on the topic of legal music sharing: why can’t I send a snippet of a song to a friend, or a bookmark to purchase the song on the online music store, or download the song direct and wirelessly to the IPod? That would be visionary.”

A number of design opportunities here for my thesis…:-)

A next step for me which i shall implement in the next week is aimed at discovering what values come out of sharing a unique object and being able to see the hisory of interactions that people will have with it. Being inspired by the chain-letter phenomenon, i thought i might try a chain-object event and use the web to my advantage for once as a way to link people and as a feedback mechanism. So more to come this week as i decide who to send this to, what objects i will send, what feedback mecanism to use.

As this IDFuel article adresses, we find ourselves looking at complex systems present in nature and enviously trying to mimick them.

“The natural world has evolved over billions of years to include an unbelievably complex array of interactions and dependencies, most of which are unknown, and many of which are remarkably unexpected. Intentional design, while very much different from evolution, shares a number of common solutions and themes, as we’ve discussed many times before. Would it be so surprising that the same sort of web of interdependency exists in the product design world?”

The web is indeed a stricking example of interdependancy and complexity in a system whose inherent values include sharing, communities, etc. and which are completely absent from the product world. I am really interested in this issue and hope to find more material to inspire a possible real-world application.

From the communal ovens of europe:

“These common ovens also encouraged diversity for the “loaves going into the oven were slashed with distinct patterns so each family got back its own–really its own, since the grain from which it was made was grown on their farm.” via IDFuel

This makes me think about the power of diversity in communal sharing and the power of the unique results that could come out of sharing an object with particular people. How would an object react to whether you use it with you girlfriend versus using it with your friends.

On the sharing front here is an interesting project about sharing your lunch with very little inconvenience by Sternform in Germany.