designswarm thoughts

“The cupcake is a real symbol of femininity and a camp symbol of a bygone era,” says Shail. “People really respond to it and love it.” (Although, unfortunately, few people actually eat the cakes, because they tend to assume that they are poisoned or laced with drugs.)

via The Guardian

I’ve never in my life given that answer to that question. Am I the only one? I get the feeling this is an American perspective on the role of an interaction designer. Is it the only one? I hope not.
via core 77

“An iPhone is a phone you can FUCKING PUT DOWN for five minutes in order to PAY ATTENTION to the people who are in the FUCKING ROOM WITH YOU”
From 2lmc.

“I do not have the authority to obligate the government to make purchases.”

Images taken while sitting in Citizen Cupcake in front of the Apple Store in SFO.

Girl in the yellow shirt from Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino on Vimeo.

Coming back from a trip to Israel reminded me about what it used to be like to commute to and from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in the 90s when I was young. There’s lot of stuff about sur and sousveillance and much digital ink has been spilt on the subject of security and fear, but airport interactions in 2008 either make you feel safe, afraid, frustrated or bored. From the long cues at Heathrow where you really feel you are wasting your time and might never see your luggage again, to the other end of the spectrum, embodied by my experience with  El Al.

The whole thing started because I was late. The truth is I hate flying long-haul as I get completely bored and usually drive Matt insane after a few hours. Living and traveling around Europe, I never usually have to deal with that particular issue as most flight last under 2 hours. A glorified bus.

After a number of poor timing and transportation decisions around London, I showed up at the El Al counter an hour before the flight. I immediately knew I was in trouble as the young assistants (one seemed to be about 19) started questioning me quite thouroughly: “Where are you going in Israel”, “Who do you know there”, “How long have you known them”, “Where did you study”, “What do you do”. This didnt feel like anything you’d get out of the Ryanair staff. The young women (there were 3 of them at that point) were looking at me quite intently as if they had already made up their mind that I was a danger to their airline and by extention, their country. There was absolutely no agressive behaviour, the tone of voice was not raised, but the suspicion lay under the surface. They then proceeded to put my luggage (I hadn’t checked in at that point you must remember) through an x-ray machine larger than your average kitchen. Something in my laptop bag disturbed one of the young women and she asked for it to be scanned at least 5 other times. My check-in luggage was then carefully put on a table, as one of the other young women proceeded to ask me more questions about where I had lived and tell me a bit about her own travel, opened, all carefully packed items removed one by one, inspected and swabbed for explosives.

I settled into a state I can only describe as submissive as my future clearly lay in their hands.

They then proceeded to tell me that my hand luggage would be waiting for me at the gate (this implied they didnt want me to add anything to it before I got into the plane) and that I had to get to the gate as fast as possible (ie “run Alex run”) because the flight was leaving soon. So with little other than my passport, boarding pass and iPod, I sprinted through El Al’s dedicated security line guarded by a policeman (soldier?) holding a machine gun.
I ran like my life depended on it across the terminal only to get to the gate and have to go through body search and x-ray all over again. At that point it was clear the flight had been delayed, so panting and coughing, I relaxed at last.
I guess at the time I booked my tickets, I had wanted to make it a more authentic experience and never thought I would get in the plane with respect for a country and a company I had never encountered before. Safety and security at it’s most literal level.

They may look unrelated but these words will save your life here.

Pants = underwear as opposed to trousers

Bin = garbage

Chips = fries

Crisps = chips (i know, very confusing)

Wanker = idiot

Something that’s starting to tick me off in the world of information visualisation goes back to why people found it interesting to begin with. When we didn’t know any better, we’d leave information visualisation to Powerpoint and Excel and only insiders and people who’d been to the right schools were able to make any sense of it. The meaning of the information was hidden behind a layer of understanding the average person lacked.

In an age of obsession with visually displaying information (thanks Mr Tufte) that is not directly accessible to us (such as how much carbon is being emitted, information is more accessible to the masses of course, but I’m wondering if that’s all there is to it. “Oh, wow, thats all lot!” is pretty much where information visualisation leaves me at the moment or “Oh, nice!”

We are at a pivital moment where we are collectively starting to suffer from doom’s-day fatigue and our ability to see into the future and observe the consequences of our everyday actions is trumped by these constant visualisations of the depressing “now”.
Part of being a responsible adult is supposed to be about taking responsability for our actions and understand that they have consequences is it not? Why can’t our technologies help us with that? I would like to see us move towards a world full of little everyday objects that give me a glimpse into the future if I keep doing things the way I do, total yearly bills based on my current usage, predictions about how much I’ll have to spend on food and how much weight I’ll gain if I keep at the current pace. It’s not prescriptive and I don’t think it’ll be depressing. It’s just making information I need to lead a sustainable life, more easily accessible and more empowering than simple clever reporting.

I guess that used to be on the next slide.

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.

I don’t want to look like I’m crying wolf here, but certainly you can’t ignore the signs.

From why design conferences should be better to how we should design ouselves out of consumer culture ending with Stark himself saying it’s all a bit shit really, things don’t sound too good for product design at the moment.

Tweetclouds.

So according to the cleverness of the internets, I have 123 readers (through rss at least).

That’s much bigger than I thought, especially considering how many blogs on “design” are out there. So I thought I’d stop and say:

Sorry for the more than one paragraph-long rants.
Sorry for the small type.
Sorry for being so damn demanding and critical.
Thanks for following.

Seperate random conversations with Pix and Rob and finishing up my Baudrillard book have put me in a philosophical mood, not sure what it all means for now, but thought I’d make a public note of it.

FIRST: Heard through Twitter of this Muxtape phenomenon, essentially using our favorite tool, the internet, to once again try to time travel back to days of slower technology. The sound of rewinding back to your favorite song, exchanging tapes, losing them, breaking them and having to wind them back together with pencils (you know what i’m talking about i’m sure) were probably not elements that any of the designers of tapes thought would become associate with such a small and technical object.

THEREFORE: Rhetoric question: are we entering a kind of cultural “dark age” characterised by “a lack of contemporary written history, general demographic decline, limited building activity and material cultural achievements in general, a time of ignorance and superstition”? You have to wonder about the kids who are internet-native and whether they will learn to question it, hack it, patch it back together and accept it’s faults understanding that this isn’t the end all be all of their world but also humbly, just technology made of wires, capacitors, pcbs, etc.

EVEN THOUGH: I know a lot of programmers started learning about computers while still quite young programing on the BBC Micro perhaps, but for the rest of us, computers were for computer class and usually involved telling a little turtle where to go. The phone was something you used to call your friends after school while listening to the radio and gossiping, getting scolded by your parents for keeping the line busy. Days of friction, when technology was a small part of our daily landscape.
WHICH MEANS: Maybe i’m being a little too philosophical and suffering from a really early form of “back in my days”, but there might be something to be said for a generation like mine that grew up with things that didnt quite work that well: broken tapes, clunky walkmans, personal diaries, passing notes in class, and making paper airplanes. What happens in a world of seamlessness and where things rarely stop working? Does anyone learn to live without them? Do we stop questioning that they even exist because they are so effective and we forget that they are there at all? Stuff that of course governments and policy makers are thinking about specifically in relation to privacy online but I think it extends further into a global understanding of technology or daily assumptions about technology.
Sometimes it feels that progress was a little too fast to come and Gen X and Mtv is still not totally ready for it but that “Generation whatever is on youtube” might never learn to question it and wonders how we ever managed before all of this happened.