Author: moleitau

Sweep the forecourt

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File under “Ammo”: a Saul Bass anecdote with which to buttress brand-experience design:

“When my NatWest business cheque book finally did arrive with its tweaked logo and grown-up colours I was reminded of a Saul Bass story which might interest those responsible for the bank’s new look.

When the design legend was invited to refresh the livery and visual identity for a chain of gas stations he drove into one of them to check out the customer experience. The forecourts were filthy, the attendants sloppy and the service virtually non-existent. When he called the client to find out what plans they had to address these issues, he was told not to worry because all that was expected from him was a bright new look and feel. He walked away from the job.”

» FT.com: Creative Business: Don’t bank on the brand

iChatStatus

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Since I’ve started running iChatStatus a week ago, 3 people 4 people (Hi Euan!) so far have IM’d me in response to the “now playing in iTunes” status I’ve asked it to display. They reponses have been ones of

  • identification: “Hey! I’ve got that song! / I love that! / I was just listening to that”
  • mood-divining: “aaah… Queens of the Stone Age, eh? Working? / Beach Boys! Happy about something are we?”

Expression by proxy of the media I consume, ambient, trickling, clouding around me. To my friends, to my buddylist, while I’m busy doing other kinds of nothing.

Should it up-sticks with me and follow me round, this cloud? Just as iTunes never leaves me, pouring itself regularly into it’s iPod EVA suit. If I had a bluetooth cloud of ID3 tags around me would I like strangers to be able to sniff them?

What social advantage would there be to activating this SongGetty?

We often wear the t-shirts of the bands we want people to think we like while we secretly listen to deeply loved but unhip esoteria. Guilty pleasures contradicting our projected persona.

Also, I would ordinarily never play music to myself while in the physical proximity of my buddylist friends – I’d be talking with them I’d hope.

Some edge-cases and markets present themselves – long journeys in the company of friends maybe, opting to broadcast your playlists to others and seize upon coincidences as socially-acceptable interruptions of the natural (and hopefully comfortable) together-alone silences. Or the t-shirt metaphor transfigured: younger folk looking to find common ground in public settings around their media choices.

Betteridj likens it to active-badge tech/concepts pursued by the world and his wife for donkey’s years.

It’s here after a fashion in the form of iChatStatus: scriptable, personal and extensible.

—
[n.b. must finish reading Byron and Nass]

Vehicular not ultimate

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Fabulous post from WDavies in iSociety‘s continuing quest to examine the reliance of the networked society on emergent GoogleTruth. He attended a seminar/discussion about the influence of the kind of knowledge and ideas produced by policy thinktanks on society, which includes this fascinating list of characteristics:

“The type of knowledge produced by LSE and Demos is defined as:

  • vehicular not ultimate [particularly interesting idea: this knowledge is not expected to remain valid, but to be a useful way of producing further knowledge by drawing interesting people together; its constantly snowballing and fragmenting]
  • diagnostic not predictive
  • meaning rich/information poor
  • communicative not representational
  • transient not timeless
  • inclusive not polarising“

All it ever takes is a view well-placed /stutter/edit/ a few well-placed, finely-crafted, meaning-rich/info-poor Oblaat-shielded memebullets… The world is slicked with the vaz, and everything slides. Goodnight, United Nations.

» iSociety blog: “The university of chat”

Tab Context

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Sounds like a great name for a pulp-fiction character. A UI Engineer that by night, uses his uncanny Fitts-law-honed reflexes to FIGHT CRIME.

Alternatively, it could be something Stefan cares about a lot in his user-experiences.

FWIW, I agree with Stef. Tabs have mutated as to create such wildy different expectations in people using interfaces that feature them; but showing different modes or views of data based around a central point of departure or query seems to have emerged as the default understanding.

In 1999, Jakob Neilsen was bemoaning the fact that tabs where moving away from this meaning:

“I still think that less than 50% of sites use tabs in the (erroneous) meaning of navigating to the main sections of the site. Thus, I still think that the correct use of tabs is preferred and I recommend using different techniques to visualize the main areas of the site. But this may be a losing battle and I may have to revise this recommendation in a year or so if more and more sites adopt a misguided use of tabs.”

So, he was keeping his eye on whether the consensus/convention had shifted. With UI changes in 800lb convention-setting gorrilas like Hotmail and Amazon in the meantime, has it?

What’s your experience?

» Whitelabel.org: “Search engines and maintained keyword state”

Forget “Hamlet on the holodeck”

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…it’s all about scriptable dancing bluetooth robots performing West Side Story round the watercooler:

“so damn cool, so damn script them to dance when I get email, so damn walk around my desk and stand by my diary when it’s a birthday and eat that you closed garden SPOTwatch, so all of that that it needs to be said again: Dancing Bluetooth robots!”

Oh, and before I forget, I must thank Matt Webb for his nice words about the underlying concepts of BBCi Search.

» Interconnected.org: “slipping gently into the age of ubicomp…”

Fashion telemetry, fading telempathics.

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Telempathics in keitai-culture:

“It seems girls just wanna find common ground, even if it’s designer handbags or the right pair of shoes. For 17-year-old Ayaka Sasaki, who lives on a farm in northern Japan, “Girls Walker gives me a heads up on what’s popular in Tokyo, so I don’t feel like such a hick.”

Meanwhile, Adam V-2 starts planning a moblogging conference, and the telempathics I really want to access today are only available via the googlecache.

» WiReD 11.03: Play: Blog Party
» Girlswalker.com
[via Chris and Keitai-l]