designswarm thoughts

Last month, Carole invited me to come in, lecture and help her graduating MA Textile Futures students understand the value of building an online presence of their own. I ended up putting together a few presentations to explain the value of what the internet was about, how it could help them in their career, etc. I learnt a lot and observed a lot along the way. Some of it shocked me, some of it are service ideas that are just screaming to happen and I thought I’d share. Feel free to reap the benefits :)

It’s 2010. The golden age of technology right? Well, managing an online presence, understanding what it’s all for when you’re not a web designer or involved in web design or “social media”, turns out to be more obscure than in 2005. Let me explain.

In 2003, I took a Flash class in my product design course. Horrible, obscure stuff where the end result was a Flash website. Need I say more? In 2005, half way through my master’s in IDII, I learnt how to code my own website (thanks to the many hours I spent with Didier who had the patience to teach me HTML & CSS). The year after that Yaniv made it compulsory to use WordPress to communicate our progress in our thesis work. I still find PHP a horrible thing to understand, but the hours spent paid off eventually. I moved on to being Karola’s sysadmin and web designer (I get jewellery in return you see) which keeps me coding once in a while. So all in all, that’s 5 years worth of investment that unless you’re in a “media” course of some sort, you’ll never encounter. This is a problem.

1. The internet’s ultimate designer package.
Most students will access the internet to have access to particular social communities (FB, Twitter, etc), do google searches for images and check email. They have no real understanding about the value of having their own URL (nevermind that they don’t know what URL means) until you ask them to Google themselves. Then they get it. If there’s a business idea here, its a packaged “registration, hosting and wordpress/tumblr/whatever installation” package. Having that will compete and just eat up horrible sites like indexhibit.org (i don’t even want to link to them) to stop taking advantage of creative people who just want a “box” to put images and captions in. Designers want to worry about the right things, want some degree of personalisation and want to get on with the business of designing quickly.

2. Ignorance is not bliss.
Reliance on “IT support” is strong in the creative industries. This means the IT sector takes the piss and doesn’t educate designers. There is no knowledge exchange, there are only service providers who make designers totally dependant. Explaining to a designer what FTP is, getting them to write their first index.html page and upload it and see it there, means they can then understand what happens behind the curtain and can have a creative discussion about it. Again, not talking about anyone involved in the “new media” sector but everyone else, photographers, textile designers, product designers, etc. Some of the women I spoke to about this (was an all-women course) were amazed and happy to build a vocabulary that made that world of acronyms make more sense.

3. Portfolio communities are horrible.
One of the missconceptions of design graduates, is that shoving their work into online communities for other designers will help them build a voice online. Looking at my own experience, when I graduated from product design school, core77 and if you were a bit cool, Computer Love or if you were really cool K10K were the places to go. What changed soon after that, was that your best friend online became Google and the blogs that linked to the work ( think WMMNA, Cool Hunting, Swissmiss or Mocoloco). In 2010, well it’s partially about Twitter love, but still very much about Google, not about walled gardens but about rich networks of relationships.

4. Flickr’s golden opportunity.
I just spent the day with Karola rethinking her website, and in the end, we found that it was easier to ask her to update Flickr and for her website to just link to slideshows of work. She understands HTML because I bullied her into it ;) , but she’s obviously now much more active and at ease thinking about Flickr, managing an image around her work, and thinking about the power of imagery. So we redesigned her website to basically end up being a “wrapper” around Flickr sets. It’s not Flickr, so she feels its her own space. If you Google her, you’ll get her website first, which is what she wants, but all the assets end up living elsewhere, in a space she’s happy to manage and where customer support is easy to handle through commenting. If Flickr was interested in monetizing at all, this I think would be a nice way to do it.

5. Education
In the end, I was happy to come and talk to the students about this, because noone had really bothered to give me such an introduction when I was a student. I’m not sure to what extent this shouldn’t become a compulsory module for design course “Online identity management” as so much of our work as professionals relies on promoting our work as much as possible, and this isn’t only through publications in magazines anymore. With the recent cuts in education, I doubt this idea will have any traction, but hey, that’s my 10 cents.

I don’t like chocolate that much anymore and I’ve already promised myself to do more exercise, so all there’s left to commit to are a loose collection of interests I’d like to pursue in the coming year:

- Find out what’s behind the current trend of doomsday scenarios for the future..is it only a byproduct of a downturn? Can we find solutions to this general malaise? Is it common to former times of despair? (Great depression? Great war?) Future-casting is now a completely depressing activity (see Trend Blend 2009.

- Where is design going exactly? On one hand we have very cheap and limited productions by a limitless number of young aspiring designers being pumped out of every design school in the world every year (see See Super Christmas Market), then we have design for the masses with every new version of iPod or Dyson vacuum cleaner, then we have luxury focused products made by signature designers ( see the rest of OLPC designer Yves Béhar‘s work as an example ), then we have design that wants to occupy the same function as art , then architects who design products (although that’s always been a sort of tradition) and then design as a business solution. I’m interested in this absolute dilution and often wonder if the field will dissapear entirely as we enter the post-modern age and industrialised processes break down and shut down or if people will stop referring to “design” as an activity at all. Will design be a word that will become “dirty” in 30 years, by referring to an era of 100 years of absolute excess?
Related: Will product designers stop using Flash in their websites and start participating in the global internet conversation? What would convince them?

- How can you teach people management skills when they are young entrepreneurs who don’t have an MBA? I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff out there, but i’m looking for bite-sized advice.

- Can people be interested in DIY problem-solving when they’ve been spoon-fed with produts to fulfill every solution to every problem they could imagine in the past 60 years? What can we learn from our grand-parents? Should governments be taking a more active role?

- Sustainability / climate change / global warming is impacted by sets of constraints and imbalances in a system we can’t quite wrap our heads around, can we build a machine (not unlike this one) to illustrate the problems tangibly?

- What is the next generation of web-enabled products and interactions? I can feel this is really going to be very exciting. Should designers and developers be working together on this? YES!

There, that should keep me busy.

It took me a while to digest Janne’s post on why ubicomp is a broken concept, mostly because on principal I tend to disagree. It’s also a bit in response to Tom Coates’s altered version of his talk with Matt Jones that he gave at Foocamp called “Personal Informatics”.

Firstly I think the starting point for thinking about ubiquitous spaces, objects etc is not necessarily that they are meant to be smarter, but perhaps more that they are meant to report better. Not smart, just less dumb :) Andy’s house is the obvious example of this. I think there is tremendous interest at the moment about being able to gather more efficiently stuff that is just lying around, invisible and not particularily useful. Innovation often comes from taking things we know and mashing them up with things we didn’t know we didn’t know. Someone pointed out the other day that we’re ultimately creeping towards AI with all these “clever” systems, but I think it might just be the reverse, we still hold the brain, we’ve just outsourced the synapses.

Also I think there are plenty of areas to think about in regards to the results of ubiquitous systems, information and data. One of the most important things, in my opinion has to do with evaluating the amount of behavioral or operational change based on the digestion and synthesis of all this data. It’s no use collecting the temperature and light levels inside a building if it isn’t with the aim to perfect your heating system or prevent collective seasonal depression for eg. Even on a personal basis, its no use me being able to monitor my heartrate everyday, because it only puts me in the “now”, an ephemeral place of thought and decision-making. One thing about technology, is that it tends to make people generally lazy about their levels of commitment. Perhaps we should push instead for the development of technologies and applications that encourage people to invest time and effort in an activity (think Honey we’re killing the kids).

Furthermore, what’s interesting about this idea of personal ubiquity is that some of it could possibly be shared online, so no longer relying on a sturdy and professional infrastructure other than the internet itself. Seeing people play around with Pachube and the Ethernet Arduino shield, makes things really exciting.

All in all I think the ubicomp ideas of the future will be more personal, more persuasive and lighter than what we’ve seen so far.

Just went through 2 “secondary security” checks at San Francisco airport today and got introduced to this delightful contraption.

“To collect microscopic particles for analysis, the EntryScan³ takes advantage of a natural upward airflow around the body called the “human convection plume.” By not using forced airflow from a fan-which stirs up dust and other contaminants-cleaner samples are collected.”

What this means is that you walk into this box with glass doors on one end and without warning they will spray you with air quickly and at every angle. Not only is it really scary and unexpected, but you also get the added pleasure of having it blow your shirt upwards… not usually what you’re looking for from a security device.

Gotta love the US.

“When you look at the population as a whole, there is no way of describing the patterns. The problem with answering this question is that people normally are not tracked — but today we are tracked thanks to the phones we carry with us.”

Nature

Peak oil

Peak technology

Peak blogging.

Things are starting to feel awkward.

Random thoughts triggered by Nicola’s link.

What if what was going to be a major roadblock to ubiquitous computing is the idea that as users, we want to be able to point to where a “technology-enabled” object lies? That we cannot live with the idea that we no longer have an on/off relationship like the one we have with our phone or laptop. Can we come to accept the implications of “ubiquitousness” and give up the ability to encapsulate technology in our hands, inside a thing we can kick, curse or accuse?

Can we accept that we may no longer be able to see where exactly technology operates because it’s unevenly distributed and invisible? For John Doe, questions will arise like how much technology is ubiquitous technology? How distributed and where is it distributed and for what purpose? It’s not only going to be a preoccupation of the systems but of the urban human psyche, it will affect how we relate to technology in general and our perception of it as something that is controllable or something much closer to Big Brother: controlling, everywhere and impatient.

“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.

Cartoon by Dave Walker via We Blog Cartoons.

How to cater to an audience…

via Asian Pacific Headhunter

This article prompted some thoughts about this society’s obsession with documenting everything. The article starts rather nicely with

“When I was a boy—I can remember how my Mother would spend a good part of her Sundays. She would take out her phonebook—a tattered collection of names and numbers written in handwriting you could barely read, and re-connect with her personal network—an intimate collection a family and friends. She didn’t create media other than the pictures she took or the video my father shot on his 8mm video camera. ”

Somehow this sounds way more soothing and relaxing than what we’re living now. With these “lifestreams” we’re creating, these social networks, having friends see every corner of our conscious and subconscious existence, pictures, statuses, pokes, twitters, games, applications, we’re also creating an unprecedented set of expectations. “I should post more often on Flickr before I drop off the map” was something I heard recently. These things are starting to sound like work.

Being dedicated at doing something used to be for workaholics. In the meantime we’ve all turned into sociaholics. Progress in society meant we would one day have more time to ourselves:the illiusion of the Homo ludens. But as the NYTimes was quick to point out, we are enjoying less and less free time. So we’ve turned fun into work and are desperate to have fun at work.

There used to be a trend in interaction design of thinking aboutslow technology and creating relaxing experiences for people to have, like slow food, slow travel. But technology by definition has never been slow. Interacting with technology isn’t a slow activity. It’s about being efficient, getting things done, so that you can… hmm… post pictures up on Flickr.

So I have to wonder,will we collectively keep going or will the height of this bubble be a collective “stop”, a global yearning for a technology-lighter existence. Will this be the push towards AI where we literally have nothing to do, no button to push, tranquil in the knowledge that everything is already being captured, edited, published, without us having to lift a finger. Will we actually ever live a moment without having to absolutely, irrevocably, reach down in our pocket for our phone camera and push that button?

Or maybe we were never meant to be totally ludens in the first place.

I’m a terrible geek. I don’t buy my own stuff. My ibook came with my grad program. My camera is a loan from Matt who also gave me my iShuffle as a gift (which I have forgotten in the washer twice so far). My phone is a gift from my best friend who bought it in the UK back in 2001.

So when the iPhone will come out and millions will start carrying them around and showing off, chances are, i’m not going to get one. However, i’m ready for this conversation already:

Someone, somewhere in 2010 – Wow, you don’t have an iPhone!
Me – Nah, it’s too heavy.

Tom Klinkowstein will be exhibiting a visual projection of what it will feel like in a connected world in 2030, a project he worked on with Irene Pereyra:

“The project, a large digital “diagrammatic narrative”, portrays a day in a designer’s life in the year 2030 and her relationship to the objects and environments around her (now infused with powerful communication, sensing and artificial intelligence capabilities). The project is tentatively scheduled to premiere at the Singapore International Design Festival in November 2007.”

After his well known piece about the life of a designer from 1990 to 2090, I can’t wait to see this one.

via xkcd