designswarm thoughts

So I thought I’d map out the interesting academic environments where one might find a course that relates in some way shape or form to interaction design in the broadest sense possible (notice there aren’t any web courses here). I’m interested in how these schools form the professionals of tomorrow and how the field will find it’s way on the overall market. I’ll evenutally try to do the same with the interaction design businesses.

Note that this map is publicly editable so if I’m missing something, do add to it!

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This is a little project of mine that was born over a year ago in Amsterdam but went into hibernation for a while for obvious reasons. I’m happy to consider this is my first actual contribution to the web2.0 conversation.

I’d like to thank D’arcy Saum, Richard Groenendijk and Nicholas Land for helping me out on this project.

Constant Setting:

Communications technologies allow us to be connected globally but there is nothing more deeply moving than the natural and uncontrollable motion of the day. Every hour of the day, somewhere in the world, Mother Nature offers us that symphony of color, and we take pictures of it.

Constant setting is a simple website that displays in real time, any sunset images taken and posted to Flickr as creative commons that correspond to the cities where the sun is setting at the moment.

You can see the city where the image was taken (which you can click to be redirected to the Google maps location, if you don’t know where in the world that is) as well as its geographical information (long / lat) and the local time in that city.

You can also see who took the picture and get redirected to the original picture to add to your favorites! There’s a little timer to let you know how long to the next one, and because this is crowdsourced in a way, it might go back to the same image, until it finds an image tagged with “sunset” for the next location.

Enjoy and do let me know what you think! Consider this version1.0 :)

Matt put up a nice map of the startups in Shoreditch, glad we’re somehow web2.0 enough for that map :)

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Wordpress ate my first attempt, so here I go again. After several years of recommendations I finally decided to make it to Reboot, the much-loved Copenhagen-based conference orchestrated by Thomas Mygdal-Madsen. I was there primarily for Tinker mind you (we ran a workshop on the second day) but I attended a few talks and thought I’d jot down some quotes and thoughts from these 2 days.
FAVORITE TALK: Marko Ahtisaari spoke about wellbeing from a philosophical and economics point of view which I quite enjoyed. The theme of the conference was “free”, which a lot of speakers seemed to interpret as an invitation to add the word “free” to the title of their talk. Marko didn’t make that mistake and spoke eloquently revealing his background as a professor of philosophy. Quoting from 3 different perspectives (those of John Rawls, Esa Saarinen and Amartya Sen) he presented different approaches to how wellbeing and happiness are evaluated, how we approach our establised institutions and the impact they have on our happiness and issues of perception of freedom. Fantastic stuff.
TALK WITH THE MOST POTENTIAL: Molly Wright Steenson spoke about the concept of space and modularity by comparing the work of Cedric Price in his Generator project and the war tactics of the Israelis during the mid-90s also referred to as “walking through walls”. I thought it was interesting to think of the different intepretations of space especially from a historical perspective. I’d like to see more cross-overs with the way we look at the web from a historical perspective (especially in the light of recent debates) I think we have a tendancy to be too much “in the moment” when we think of new technologies and to bridge out to other areas of specialisation would be really useful in geek conferences. Molly’s perspective was really welcomed in that respect.

A quote I thought Brendan would enjoy from Molly’s talk “Designing for delight and pleasure should very seldom be seen to happen and must encompass doubt, danger, mystery and magic”.

I went to see a few other talks, most of them not really worth reporting though as they were either really badly structured or product pitches in disguise. Not my cup of tea in a conference context but part of the dynamics of Reboot as the schedule is pretty much decided in an un-conferency kind of way. The weather was beautiful though and this gave me an excuse to go in and out of sessions and catch up with a few people who I hadn’t seen since my Amsterdam days.

I gave a talk on the challenges of building a business that is part of the ecology of an open-source hardware platform (not posting the slides right away, as I want to test this talk on the Americans next week) and even made it to Danish radio!
In general, I loved the city and the context of the conference. I can’t say I came back with any great new ideas on the state of things and I thought a lot of it was rather old stuff being presented for the nth time, which of course affects the level of enthusiasm of the speakers. Having said that, perhaps that’s not what conferences are for these days. They’re maybe just a way to meet up with old friends and make new ones, because really, the rest is all online :)

This sounds like a great way to answer

Just to cheer me up… here’s some of the latest lovely things from Dopplr

Not that I’m known for being inflammatory but this is total bullshit. In short, our Topoware store was shut, because we weren’t craft enough it seems. No warning, no nothing, just a snappy email once the store had already been shutdown. What sort of customer service is this? If you sell on Etsy and don’t hand sew every single thing yourself, consider yourself warned. I certainly won’t be using them anymore. I’ve included their email and my reply for posterity.
———————
THEM

” Hi there!

This is Tim from Etsy Support. I’m getting in touch with information about what can be sold on Etsy, because it looks like the item featured in your shop might not fit within our selling guidelines.

Here is an outline of what can be sold on Etsy :

Handmade by You: Artists and crafters can sell things they have made. Some production assistance is allowed, but the person running the shop needs to have a large part in creating the items for sale.

Vintage Goods: These must be at least 20 years old. ‘Vintage Style’ items less than 20 years old can’t be sold.

Crafting Supplies: You can sell commercial products that are made for crafting. Things commonly used for crafting but not made for that purpose do not qualify.

Because your listing does not meet our selling criteria, the shop has been closed. Please get in touch if you’d like to sell items that fit into one of the categories above.

Let me know if you have any questions about this!
Thank you,

Tim

Etsy Support”

———————
US

“Hello Tim,

You find me and Karola extremely shocked of such a dramatic and unfair move on Etsy’s part. Firstly these criteria have never been presented to us as we set up the store several months ago now. Secondly, we have designed Topoware ourselves and invested in getting it manufactured (as it’s nearly impossible do get ceramics and tableware done yourself) in a small quantity of 50 pieces only and in the UK (instead of China like most) in the hope that this detail would be appreciated by the Etsy community. Clearly it isn’t.

I will be blogging about this as I find it a shameful customer service process for any web platform.  As a designer, will no longer recommend it to my friends and colleagues.

best regards,

A”

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.

Tweetclouds.

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.

Got tagged by Marc of 31volts so here goes. This is how I would characterise service design:

Getting a meal at MacDonald’s, getting a weekly vegetable delivery from Abel and Cole, ordering chinese takeout, going on your weekly supermarket run, getting your lunch from the office canteen, all the same thing, but not the same at all.

Got this from god knows where, but thought I’d let Montrealers know about this evening next week.

I’ve started contributing to Shift6 , an industry-facing blog about young people and media associated with Blyk. Follow my occasional rants about an age group I am no longer part of :P

Ok so del.icio.us sucks right now.

After sending them 3 support emails and no reply or help whatsoever, I’ve decided to suspend my daily automated posting and go for a sidebar posting instead. Yes I know most people don’t actually visit my site and RSS is king, but I can’t stand this anymore and I’m pretty sure it annoys you guys as well…
Grumble, I hope they wake up or I’ll look into other automated bookmarking options…

You’d have to be in the coma this past week not to have noticed that half the universe is in Austin for what feels like a geek version of prom night.
It’s also in times like these that it feels more lonely on the web in a way, as most of the people who don’t get a chance to meet get to spend a week together while the rest of us are spectators of that time and enjoyment. It’s a strange feeling of being at the end of the network, where it really feels like you’re a voyeur, desperately reaching out for anything people will share: pictures on Flickr, tweets, blog posts, etc.

Or maybe I should get out more :)