Month: April 2003

“Faster than the speed of anyone”

moleitau

From his mailing-list, “bad signal”, Warren Ellis on creativity and recombinance:

“I still get asked with appalling regularity “where my ideas come from.”

Here’s the deal. I flood my poor ageing head with information. Any information. Lots of it. And I let it all slosh around in the back of my brain, in the part normal people use for remembering bills, thinking about sex and making appointments to wash the dishes.

Eventually, you get a critical mass of information. Datum 1 plugs into Datum 3 which connects to Datum 3 and Data 4 and 5 stick to it and you’ve got a chain reaction. A bunch of stuff knits together and lights up and you’ve got what’s called “an idea”.

And for that brief moment where it’s all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can’t be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein’s brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.

And… how it makes you feel:

“It’s ten past two in the morning, and I’m completely wired, caught up in the new thing, shivering and laughing and glowing in the dark. Just as well it’s the middle of the night. No-one would be safe from me right now. I could read their minds and take over their heartbeats with a glare.

Faster than the speed of anyone.

That’s how it works.”

» Warren Ellis: Bad Signal

May the road rise with you

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Mentioned Le Parkour as evidence of superhumanity before, and now Mr. Ellis has woven it into the awesome Global Frequency. Dan Hill and Chris Heathcote discuss it here.

In Dan’s post he goes on to mention “The Green Wave”, an almost mythic urban phenomenon, where one catches a wave of green (go) lights at traffic signals driving through central london.

I remember once in the middle of the night in San Francisco, being taken up to the top of a three-stepped hill (near the Mint?) by my friend Nicole, then a designer for WiReD. She waited at the lights, engine revving until the it hit green.

She hit the gas, and we barrelled down the hill… reaching the next set of lights just as it hit green – they were on one of the steps and we got a little air under us… Faster, and down the next set of lights, still on red…

Still on red…

Still on red…

They turned green the instant we passed them, almost as if in doing so we had activated them – and flew…

There I was, fingernails dug into the dashboard, grinning with fear and realization that I was in a thousand films at once. Films that had been born out of a location scout or director knowing that San Francisco allowed you to do this there, if you just let the city play with you hard enough.

Off to SF/Santa Clara tomorrow for O’Reilly EtCon, to meet up with the British Geek Expeditionary Force.

Hopefully see you there.

Wormsphere

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From an interview with E.O.Wilson, author of Consilience:

“Nematode worms, he says, account for four of every five animals living on Earth – and are so abundant that if the planet’s surface vanished, its “ghostly outline” could still be made out in the biomass of nematodes, almost all of species unknown.”

Fantastic.

» Harvard Magazine: E.O. Wilson: “Of Ants and Earth”
[via Aula]

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UPDATE: The “wormsphere” quote seems to be originally by N.A. Cobb in 1915. It’s a little longer, and if anything, a little more poetic:

“In short, if all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. Trees would still stand in ghostly rows representing our streets and highways. The location of the various plants and animals would still be decipherable, and, had we sufficient knowledge, in many cases even their species could be determined by an examination of their erstwhile nematode parasites.”

Drawing deepens the groove.

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The all-powerful LMG points to notes on Grant Morrison’s recent talk at the ICA [my emboldening]:

“Among the reminiscences and explainations of technique (“I write the background script, and when I get the pencils back, write the dialogue to match the art. It’s like working with actors.”), he explains why he thinks comics are so powerful as a medium.

“I think comics gain something from being drawn,” he says, “all that meticulous attention focussed on each line, on the pencils, and then the inks, it give them a special power,” and I pretty much miss what he says next while I think about that, and how it ties in with William Burroughs’ idea of energy ground down into and how maybe I’ve been misunderstanding what I’m doing when I draw out my strips (which, yes, I find difficult, frustrating, boring) and how maybe it isn’t about communicating well at all (sorry, Scott McCloud) but about the action of drawing over the story and thereby deepening and reiterating its its existence, making it bigger and more affecting simply by that action of paying minute attention, with your eyes, your hands, your pencil, your pen.

Deepening the groove until it resembles a canyon. I tune back in; he’s talking about sigils and how comics are sigils, or sigil-clusters. A sigil; the image or word which affects reality.”

» Grant Morrison: ten cats mad

NaviHate

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I wish I’d gone to the IA summit this year. The notes, presentations and wrap-up articles are starting to appear, and it sounds like one hell of a wide-ranging and open-minded discussion of digital design.

One debate that seems to have opened-up is on spatial metaphors of information space versus more semantic approaches. My background in architecture probably biases my approach to the subject. I’ve done a lot of work looking at wayfinding and spatial/urban metaphors for building wayfinding systems, more of which later.

Butterfield and myself have had some good-natured ding dongs in the past over this. I can’t find the comment now, but Stewart’s general drift in these matters is summed up here:

” genuinely think the spatial metaphors are badly broken and if we begin our thinking in terms of “structures” which facilitate “navigation” thorugh “information space”, we can’t help but come up with designs which are saturated with spatial concepts.

But perception and cognition don’t go on in a spatial framework (with certain exceptions which aren’t trypically relevant to this conversation), and bits of information don’t relate to each other spatially (concepts don’t exist below or beside or to the west of one another). Call me Whorfian, but how we talk affects what we do. If our talk is wrong, our work will be too.”

Andrew Dillon, in the “Wayfinding and Navigation in Digital Spaces” panel, presented something [powerpoint, 60k] that opened my head up like a can of anchovies, and rearranged a good few things in there. From Dorelle Rabinowitz’ notes on the panel, at B&A comes the memebullet, for which I stop only short of using the blink tag to emphasise:

“We talk about navigating when we mean understanding.”

This is resonating so powerfully for me that my teeth are on edge. I’ve had several rather painful conversations at work in the last couple of weeks about “navigation systems”. We have “cross-platform global navigation” projects, “navigation standards” – invoking the mysterious power of ‘consistency’ the tyrannical L-shaped shadow of the ubiquitous navigational menu looms large over me. I’m starting to experience NaviHate.

I mentioned I’d pursued spatial/urban metaphors in proposing wayfinding systems. I did a bunch of work when I first rejoined the BBC based upon Kevin Lynch’s 1963 “The Image of the City”, and how the sprawl of www.bbc.co.uk might become a more “imageable” datapolis.

Lynch’s work enables me to reconcile the spatial and semantic approaches, precisely because it studies the semantics of urban space, and how we build our images of the city from them.

Andrew Dillion’s presentation zeroes in on this approach as well I believe, with the final slide of the presentation presenting the diagram of a “semantic spatial model” wherein we process our experiences into a shape, a space built of semantic meaning. That great navigational driver of “consistency” does not necessarily support this, rather it is coherence and comprehension; a narrative that can be easily internalised, that is the goal.

Wayfinding structure, language and narrative build this: rich understanding built of many storyshapes bourne on, and of a rulespace – a physics that meaning, coherence can be condense out of consistently.

[Tangent, related: Matt Locke on Kevin Lynch, mnemonics, and Rachel Baker’s “platfrom” project]

I have to give a talk internally tommorrow on “findability” with the awesome Margaret Hanley, which I hope can start to explore some of this.

With a big site like the BBC’s where it is hard-enough to achieve “navigational consistency”, it might be a bit much to start getting into all this, but I think it’s vital to think critically about some of the ingrained idioms and metaphors – the final word on which I leave to Andrew Dillion:

“Metaphors are like sex. talking about them makes everyone a little uncomfortable. They all think that everyone else is ‘getting it’.

» IAslash.org: IA Summit 2003 links

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UPDATE: Butterfield was hoeing this row last year, mais oui.

Agent Secrets

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Matt Locke, inspired by Natalie Jeremijenko, looks at subverting our notions of what an intelligent agent might be:

“Constantly trying to make sense out of an incomplete picture, the private eye is an imperfect avatar, always a few clues short of the whole story. In the classic gum shoe novels of Raymond Chandler, this anti hero is always getting in the way rather than getting to the truth, getting implemented in the crime and led down dark alleys. How much more interesting are these double agents compared to the dumb shiny world of the intelligent agents? The double agent recognises that intelligence can never be perfect, and those who hold intelligence cast a malign, powerful shadow. After all, even the best, most discrete butler always keeps a few too many of his master’s secrets.”

» Test.org.uk: (DOUBLE) AGENCY

iSociety “Mobiles in everyday life” debate

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(Very) rough notes from last night’s launch of the iSociety report into “mobiles and everyday life” I haven’t had a chance to read the report properly yet but you can get it from there.

I turned up a little late and didn’t catch all of the opening remarks, and this is by no means a complete transcript. The debate didn’t really get going IMHO. It needed another hour or so, and some more aggressive chairing: could have really done with looking into the social aspects of the tech, rather than posturing on the business prospects of the telcos.

The only person representing the user experience side of things, Amy Brampton, didn’t get a fair crack of the whip at all.

My mumblings are in [square brackets] as per usual.
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