designswarm thoughts

Highlarious. Thanks Megan and BERG, made my day.

“the Canadian economy will remain vulnerable to cyclical downturns in commodity prices (forestry is one current example); firms and people will move to more dynamic regions; and wealth generation is dampened” say these people.

Nothing like post-hockey victory kicking.

Read one of Wired Uk’s 20 ideas worth considering for 2010 and one of them caught my eye. Clive Thomson reported on ideas from the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age and I can’t help but think that we have naturally adapted to what we so often call “information overload” in a way that doesn’t require us to design for forgetting.

One of my theories is that we’ve built up the internet as a way of finding rather than as a way of remembering, naturally allowing us to forget most of it. Digital stacks of papers and bookshelves. We’ve built up the equivalent behavior of “oh I’m sure it’s in that pile”. Digital synapses dying every day.

Just as an example, here are some things I do now as ways of forgetting:

- Use Delicious to store rather than as a reference point. I rarely look at my own bookmarks.
- Not actually remembering where a link came from, but who tweeted it instead.
- Check RSS feeds in a “watching TV”-like trance: I just click through the channels and stop on the stuff that visually catches my eye. I open my RSS reader once a week at best, and the stuff that’s at the top gets read, the rest kindof gets ignored.

We have more ways of archiving than ever but that doesn’t mean we’re interested in that archive. I was a guest lecturer last month in a design school and was shocked to find that most of the research students were pulling out was from the past 3 years at most.

Archiving doesn’t have the same qualities as a library quite yet. Maybe that’s a design opportunity, or maybe the FluidData metaphor needs to be reexamined.

In any case, I think we’re better at forgetting now than we used to and that has raised the profile of “knowledge” and “opinion” over “information” (also probably explains why blogging is not quite a dead art). The people who take the time to remember will rule us all. The rest of us, will rely on our “devices” and Google.

There are things about this type of criticism that makes me cringe. Things about this, that makes me feel like I’m not included in the city experience in the same way as my more testosterone-driven peers and that the entire point made in this article was obstructed by one simple statement:
“The next day I received an email from my, far more organised, girlfriend”.

Seems to me people help people go through stuff, life and things. Technology and infrastructures are not the only tool we have and social interactions count more in my opinion. When technology fails, you’ll still have to ask for directions whether you like it or not :) and whether you think your laptop is user-friendly or not is absolutely not related to your gender.

There. I feel better.

Stuff I’ve noticed is happening as I slowly crawl towards my 30s:

- Chocolate isn’t that great anymore. It’s still nice, but not as a snack, in the middle of the day or milky. And brownies are gross.

- Grey hair appears on pictures more clearly.

- Bullshit meter is at its most efficient.

- I’m less and less patient, and I was never patient to begin with.

- Spending an evening with a cup of tea and the internet seems like a perfectly reasonable way to spend a Saturday night.

- Living with housemates is for “young people”.

- Nostalgia sets in as a permanent state of mind. “In my days” is sometimes the start of a sentence. Not often. Just sometimes.

Shit.

Nick posted this promotional video for IDII, made in 2004 or 5. It’s been so long but seems so fresh in my mind still. Like a dream you can’t wake up from.

Interaction Design Institute Ivrea from Nicholas on Vimeo.

I’m featured in the Rising Stars section of the August edition of Wired UK (page 23), wearing attire that I wouldn’t normally be caught dead in, but hey, they were after a “feminine look”, and a girl simply cant say no to wearing 700 quid Ferragamo shoes for 15 minutes (only to end up with the photo being cropped of course).

Happy now? :)

I’m moving to Brixton next weekend after more than 2 years in Hackney. That fact may seem banal to most of you but if you’re a Londoner, changing boroughs that dramatically almost means social hara-kiri. You might as well be leaving the country. It means that I become one of those people who live “saf of the river”, a sort of social outcast for those living north of the Thames. Its funny how we like our divides. North vs south, this team versus that, this part of the country versus London.

Hackney is fantastic and more recently I’ve discovered its hidden nightlife. But in the past 2 years it’s become the borough of the “well off mid-30 something with kids”. That’s not me. I went to walk around my new place and didn’t see anyone above 35, saw lots of people trying to sell you crack and lots of strange run down shops. That’s more me at the moment. And I’ll have a garden, a luxury I’d last experienced in Amsterdam. Excitement is in the horizon regardless.

But that’s not the challenge nor the point really.

The point is I’m leaving an area of town I know well, that I’ve also called home and so I’m filled with nostalgia I don’t know what to do with. I find myself wondering now: “how am I supposed to say goodbye”? Should I spend the next 2 weeks going to all the places I’ve ever been in or enjoyed knowing the likelihood of going back often will be very limited? Should I be trying to tell people I’m moving and having “one last drink” (nevermind the fact I hardly see them even if they live around the corner)? Should I say goodbye as if I were moving to Timbuktu?

It’s a strange feeling and I don’t think any social networking service could ever help. The city forgets us but we never forget it.

Having recently gone through a series of breakups both personally and with online services, I’m starting to re-frame how I think of the connections we make online. If there was any way to establish how close you were to someone purely based on your digital traces, what would that look like?
Would you count the amount of @s on Twitter, how many of their pictures you’d favorited? The number of times they called you, texted you? I’m not sure that would make an accurate picture but it would certainly be worth plotting out (maybe something for Stamen).

In times of breakups when people reframe how they think of you, it would equally be worth plotting out how many people keep in touch with you after. Communities and friends aren’t often the same and reconstruct themselves in equally organic ways.

Some strange and loose notes taken during the workshop organised by Daniel Kaplan from FING and from Anne Galloway and Dan Hill’s talk at LIFT 09.

- Things we ask of cities include:

- Make us safe
- Make us meet
- Make us green
- Make us equal

Maybe cities are a state of mind and I should be able to take it with me anywhere I go. What if I could pack up and leave, moving the city with me? If my city is my local café, my friends and family, my level of connectivity, my favorite shops, then could I take those with me? What is the city versus “home”? Which is more important?

Can I fragment myself across all the places I exist in, live in, travel to, and make these parts of myself accessible and published? Different facets that are only revealed in that space, like geo-located and centric Mymaps.

The fine line between nomads and sedentary people is the infrastructures, the plumbing you need to setup, the walls, the trash collectors, etc.

We’re thinking about data all the time in cities, but noone is thinking about the wires, the energy that it’ll take for these infrastructures to happen, the data centres that will be built…

If we’re developing infrastructures, will anyone use it, how will people receive this “gift”?

If countries fail us, will the city save us?

Nice links from Dan Hill’s presentation that I didn’t know about:
The City by Lewis Mumford
New movement in Cities by Brian Richards
Hands over the city by Francesco Rosi

Following from what was a weepy post a week ago, I’ve decided to stop using Twitter once I reach 2000 updates (about 150 to go). I remember the evening I started using it, sometime in November 2006 when I was staying at Ben’s on Herengracht in Amsterdam. He sent me an invite and I looked at this thing and huffed and puffed (I would start working for Jaiku a few months later) going “I don’t get it”. He,of course knew better, he always does.

3 years down the line, I’ve had great fun, I’ve kept in touch with people I’d only met once, sometimes not at all. I’ve kept in touch with the latest internet memes, even the ones that only last half a day, I’ve kept in touch with the news, and more importantly I’ve kept in touch with what Matt does during his days at work in lalaland.

But I want more. Living in London, I’ve realised that I need to be much more active about meeting and seeing people in the flesh, remembering that there is a world out there, that I can just pick up the phone and call people and take news, have a coffee, have a great conversation, build real relationships, or at least ones that feel real to me. Twitter has made me lazy about those relationships.

My metaphor for using Facebook was bumping into an old friend in the street and not having anything to say to each other past the first 30 seconds. Twitter feels to me now like walking into a giant party full of people you kinda know, kinda not, some of which you’re only mildly interested in, but all of them speaking really loudly. Matt will tell you I hate those kinds of parties, they intimidate me, and now so does Twitter. So I’m leaving the party behind.

I’m glad the entire world seems to have hopped on the bandwagon, those guys deserve it. It’s just not for me anymore. I’ll try to come back to my blog, to writing and exploring an idea fully.

I won’t close my account, I simply will stop updating it and will only occasionally read it. I think I’ll make a lovely newspaper thing out of these 3 years of my life in a space that has evolved and changed so much, while I’ve been changing too. Maybe I’ll give it to my mom or something.

I’ve been invited to lead a sort of online discussion for the near-graduation 4th year students of the BA in Industrial design in Montreal. I was in their position in 2004 which seems like so ages ago and I remember the feeling. I felt like I was sortof on the brink of an abyss, the maternal warm womb of school finally letting go of me on the cold asphalt of reality, bills, student loans, rent to pay and generally not much hope for an industry that barely exists in Québec.

When I graduated in 2004, our class was 72 students. Most of them never got a job in design, only 2-3 of us went on to graduate school.
This year, the same course will have 12 graduates. I wonder who has adapted?

So I figured I’d post up some topics of discussions here since I’ve been asked to talk about “design and business”.

- We were told in 2004 that only 10% of us will go into design as a career. What do you think your chances are now?
- If you want to start a business, what will it be? What will be your USP?
- How important do you think the internet is to your future career?
- What do you think makes a good business person? Guts or reason?
- How many jobs do you think you’ll have in your career?
- Being your own boss? What do you think are the advantages/disadvantages?
- Working abroad: do you think its essential? what do you think about Québec as a market for your skills?

I look forward to the conversations very much, maybe I’ll get to see a mirror image of myself when I was young and innocent as Massimo says. :)

Russell Davies had the lovely idea of proposing a project around speculative modeling with the Lyddle End series. I received a Lock Side Stores.

This is my response in the form of imagery and conversations taking place in 2050.

1. An afternoon at the Science Museum

- So this is it?
- Yeh
- ….
- Yeh, I know, what a hike for so little.
- So, ok, when is this supposed to be from?
- Hmm, 2006 I think.
- And people lived like this? In such small spaces? With walls? No windows? No doors.
- Yeh…well I think.
- Hmm
- I know, crazy huh?
- Totally, I mean look at those plants.
- Yeh
- Don’t see those anymore.
- I wonder how lucky they thought themselves to be.
- Well, clearly not, look at what happened after.
- Yeh, I know…Fuckwits.

2. Waiting in line

- So…how long have you been waiting here?
- Hmm, 3 days now I think. Hard to tell, I doze off periodically. You?
- A week I think.
- I wonder when those guys will get out?
- Well they’ve been in there for 20 hours or so, the next ones will be up shortly.
- What do you suppose is in there anyway? I mean the rumors are pretty wild.
- Yeh I hear there’s turn of the century cultery in there with, like, real fruits and vegetables. Or, well, what they could artifically make up.
- Yeh pineapple and crumpets… I hear there’s real wooden furniture, and paper books. You can have a lie down and read.
- What’s a lie down?
- Not sure, but I heard that’s what people did back then.
- Crazy.
- I can’t wait.

Is that you forget to build an actual circle of friends around you. Friends that you can get a drink with after work, friends who want to have coffee with you on weekends. I want friends to have a chat with.

Twitter isn’t friends. Facebook isn’t friends. Flickr isn’t friends.

After nearly 2 years in this city, I don’t think London is a very good for friendships, makes it difficult to get up and see and meet people easily. Most of my friends don’t live here.

Matt is gone for 2 weeks to New Zealand to talk about the fabulous things he does , and K is touring Europe showing off her great work. I’m here alone.

I guess I’ll work some more.

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.