“Tony was right”: Etech ‘09 call for proposals/papers

August 12, 2008 moleitauLeave a comment

The Etech ’09 call for proposals/papers has been out for a week or so, and it’s theme/focus is “Living, Reinvented: The Tech of Abundance and Constraints”, which makes me doubly-excited to be participating this year on the program committee along with some y’know, actual smart people: Mike Walsh, Annalee Newitz, Natalie Jeremijenko, Matt Webb, Nat Torkington, David Pescovitz, Timo Hannay and Kati London.

Over the years I’ve given Etech a fair bit of Tony-Stark/Warren-Ellis-inspired ribbing, so now it’s time for me to put-up-or-shut-up and find some “genuine outbreaks of the future” – so, if you know of anyone (including yourself) nudging up the future slider on the reality EQ, please encourage them to submit something as soon as…

The full CFP can be found here, and some of the themes I’ll be particularly looking forward to seeing the proposals for are:

City Tech: Our cities are growing, getting bigger faster than ever before. People are rushing to them in search of economic and social opportunity?jobs, urban living, and access to culture. How can technology help us create livable, prosperous, sustainable cities? What should mass transit look like? How can we infuse urban infrastructure with sustainability? How are cities using citizens? data to become smarter? What can economics tell us about the way urban populations will change and behave?
Materials & Mechanics: Mechanics and materials develop hand-in-hand. The creation of a new, lighter metal enables iPhones and Mars Explorers. We?ll examine the latest in mechanics and the materials that enable new developments. What mechanisms will be possible? How will the coming age of materials change our clothes, our products, and our everyday lives? Can they be made the cradle2cradle way or will we simply be clogging our landfills with ingenious, meticulously crafted waste?
Mobile & The Web: The next billion people will come to the Web via connected mobile devices. Currently, many of these devices are humble dumb clients, but the iPhone, Google, and Nokia are bringing smarter clients to the masses with open platforms. How will these mini-computers change our lives? How will these jumbo-sized sensors benefit us? Will we be able to use the third screen to view an augmented world? What data will be collected and who will have access to it? Is the Web ready for the Next Billion? What will their web apps look like?

I have a feeling the key to this is going to be a distributed, active hunt in territories unfamiliar – so if you have a friend who’s a grad student doing weird things in a lab somewhere, and architect or an engineer sketching strange bio-mimetic structures on pub beer-mats; or anyone outside of the usual O’Reillysphere that you know who’s doing something exciting, do encourage them to take a look at the CfP.

Let’s make Tony proud…

—
P.s.: I’ve taken Matt Fraction‘s “Tony was right” slightly out-of-context here, via the ever-lovin’ Ryan Freitas.

Polite, pertinent and pretty: a talk at Web2.0expo SF, April 2008

July 1, 2008August 28, 2008 moleitauLeave a comment

Polite, pertinent and pretty: a talk at Web2.0expo SF, April 2008, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

To which you could add ‘tardy’: a shameful two months after the event the slides and notes from the talk are now up online here. Sorry to everyone who asked for them – and thanks for your patience!

It was a presentation by Tom Coates and myself on an area that fascinates us both – the coming age of practical ubicomp/spimes/everyware.

Although hopefully grounded in some of the design ideas explored in our respective current projects, it was a whistlestop tour around the ideas and conversations of many.

The title slide shows Timo Arnall‘s everyware symbols and obviously, Adam Greenfield‘s and Bruce Sterling‘s books loom large, as well as the work of Dan Hill, Matthew Chalmers, Anne Galloway, Schulze and Webb, Christian Nold and many others who I’ve been fortunate to meet, mail or read around this subject.

There’s certainly some scenius going on. As if to underline this, Nicholas Nova’s posted his slides from what sounds like a fascinating talk today: “Digital Yet Invisible: Making Ambient Informatics More Explicit to People”.

Looking forward to a summer of more digital/physical brainfood…

Two-thousand and prate, update

April 18, 2008 moleitauLeave a comment

Next week is mainly going to be the scary prospect of me speaking my brains at the West Coast until they’re sick of it.

First up, on Tuesday, I’m closing-out the Adaptive Path MX conference in a double-feature with Scott Hirsch. I’m hoping everyone will dig the short rock opera about social software we’ve come up with.

Then, I’m very pleased to say that my old china-plate Tom Coates is going to join me to talk about Personal Informatics at Web2.0Expo next week in San Francisco.

Tom’s been fascinated by this area for a long time I know, and the launch of FireEagle has added practical experience of creating services within the domain, so he’s really going to strap rocket-boosters to the session.

Jen Pahlka of Web2.0Expo asked me some questions about the talk/discussion that give some more flavour of what territory we’re going to try and cover. It’s going to be grounded in work on Dopplr and FireEagle, but hoping the discussion will wander off into questions of near-future EveryWare.

I’m also going to be on a round-table panel as part of Web2.0Open about UI for data-portability with Leslie the Infonaut, Tony Stubblebine and Mr. Messina, straight after, so I will be a wreck after that…

But, hopefully after a restorative burrito, I’ll have the energy for one last gig at SF IxDA, where I’ll be talking about the Howies Machine amongst other things referencing my old favourite theme of design and play.

A full week! Hopefully see you somewhere along the way.

Siege Engines, Mother-boxes, Stub-makers and Iceberg-ticklers

April 5, 2008 moleitau1 Comment

A week or so ago, Ryan of Adaptive Path conducted a long, looping interview with me over IM where we covered the above and beyond.

Of course, this was meant to be something punchy, level-headed and action-packed as a promotion for their upcoming MX event, where people want to hear about the business-like practicalities and opportunities of ‘design thinking’ etc.

Instead they got something that Peter accurately described as ‘DVD-extras’, and I’m pretty comfortable with that.

For me, at least, and YMMV of course – crispy, crunchy blue-shirt and chinos bullet-points don’t do it. Design, invention and making comes out of play, punning and rambling on – generative, diverging and looping and splicing.

I’m very glad that Ryan decided to do the interview in IM, rather than emailing me questions that I could respond to as if in an exam. It’s a fun mess, that I’m glad to say Peter returned to and found a seed of something to advance further himself: the influence that our new ability of visualising shared behaviours has on our old ability as a social species to flock.

I’m hoping that my talk at MX will have a little more discipline to it, but still have enough DVD extras there for people to pick out and run with. If you register for MX, then use the discount code AP have given me: “MXMJ”, you’ll get 15% off the
registration price…

Eno vs Shirky at the ICA

March 18, 2008 moleitauLeave a comment

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Eno vs Shirky, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Shirky vs eno: raw notes, usual disclaimers apply – not a transcript by any means.

ICA

Monday 17th march, 7pm

Eno: Emergence of social communities through networks
1988 : joined the well
Felt like a fulfilment of mcluhan idea of the global village
Persistent on a mixture of honour and shame – which is what keeps small communities together.
93-95 internet had started to grow and it was obvious it wasn?t a 60s social experiment.
Large scale online games: not idealistic global villages -they need different sorts of tools and rules to run successfully. Not anarchistic or simplistic – but nothing like business as usual.
What is the difference between a trad business like ford cars and wikipedia?

Clay: The biggest difference is that large actions generally entail large transaction costs. Scale of decisions pushes you to add some kind of structure. Till recently this was always certainly hierarchically. Internet and social tools reduce coord costs so radically that groups can form and disband easily, but still produce action. Contribution of individuals can be lightweight and distributed.
Most people do almost nothing, and a very few people do an awful lot. Power law. The value of those minimal contributions, can be aggregated to a great effect.
The search for how to structure very large networks that are building value (e.g. Wikipedia, linux) that we are living through is the experimental wing of political philosophy.

Eno: We are poorly informed by our current news media structures (cf. Nick Davies book) PR culture means opinion is careful moulded by power and distributed by a hungry and resource-starved mainstream rolling news media.
Other sources of opinion are needed – the networks.
There?s a phrase of yours I like: ?replacing planning with co-ordination?

Clay: When ever you get a mobile phone you replace plans with co-ordination. What this does for p2p comms is now coming to groups. Great example: HSBC protests on facebook (clay mentioned this on STW)

Eno: a lot of the book is about how a quantitative change becomes a qualitative change. Enabled new situations to catalyse.

Clay: what?s changed is not the tools. Society doesn?t change because of tools, but when attitudes and behaviours change. The tools plus increased social density and comfort – means early adopter techniques have become mainstream social behaviour. The public can now take the sort of actions that they were locked out of just a few years before.

Eno: we?re in England and so we?re pretty cynical compared to people from the west coast. Coming from the most surveilled society in the western world. Can?t believe that governments are going tolerate these changes in power balance that online communities create.
If the co-ordination is mostly through the internet- it?s inconceivable to me that governments are not spending billions on figuring out how to control this. Doesn?t this co-ordination online make us vulnerable?

Clay: Well – I?m not from the west coast I?m from NYC, so my levels of cynicism is somewhere between Mountain View and Brixton.
Yours is a nightmarish scenario, but the thing holding it at bay is that the internet is the first thing that merits the name ?media? because it is genuinely general purpose and flexible. The choice that governments have therefore is connect or disconnect. Too much of what the government is doing is on the same network. The danger is that certain wealthy and controlling regimes will perfect some kind of point control to remove undesirable information from the public sphere before there is casual awareness (cf. The chinese firewall)
(Starts ref: the Leipzig / Minsk ice-cream protest story from ?here comes everybody? – information cascades)

Goes to questions…

The meat-death of the universe: SxSW08

March 14, 2008 moleitau2 Comments

SxSW is over for another year, and I’m still recovering from seemingly having eaten the Cloverfield monster, BBQ’d and served with yellow sauce.

I was down to give one talk about ‘supercolliders’ – people who are maestros of social networks, and tried to keep it from being a Dopplr sales pitch as much as possible, but talked about some of the philosophical underpinnings of why we’d chosen some of the directions we had in the design.

Omar Elsayed picked up on this and summed it up more succinctly than I think I did:

“[maybe we’re talking about] two types of social apps: The first class being services where the distribution of information is informed by pre-defined relationships – you receive photos I uploaded because we had previously declared each other as friends. And the second class of services are ones where the flow of information is what defines relationships – we are friends because we regularly send each other photos we?ve uploaded. The general consensus of the panelists was that the first, more ?traditional?, model is proving increasingly ill-suited to support the activities of these extra-social, collision-prone users.”

I really like his formulation there – and also the background tile of his blog. Go look!

There was also doing of science.

Then I got drafted onto a panel about international cultures of mobile device usage. It was something I had to come at on the hoof, but the conversation flowed pretty freely. However I’m sure that both myself and the audience we wishing I was Jan Chipchase or Younghee…

As per usual I managed to miss nearly everything that people said was interesting, including the Steven Johnson / Henry Jenkins and Jane McGonigal keynotes (although I suspect the latter would have been choir-preachin’) – anyway – Dan Hon has awesome notes of eveything I wanted to see.

But – one thing that I think was an interesting trend were the ‘fringe’ mini-conferences that sprang up.

For instance a semi-private one that saw moo, etsy and threadless getting together to share plans and pain; and another open one put on by getsatisfaction for users of their software. Dopplr is starting to really use getsatisfaction more fully for support and product development so this was extremely useful (and great fun)

Nice to see that when the caravanserai hits town, some people are ready to make great, novel uses of it.

Speaking at Adaptive Path’s MX event in San Francisco, April

March 7, 2008 moleitauLeave a comment

The programme has been finalised, and I’m going to be there talking about designing social tools, using Dopplr as a case-study.

And, psst… If you register using the code “MXMJ”, you’ll get 15% off the
registration price…

Panel of Miis

March 7, 2008 moleitauLeave a comment

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The Supercollider: A Hero of the Social Network, originally uploaded by hustler of culture.

On my way to Austin for SxSW. I got drafted by Souris, and very excited to be on a panel with her, Jen Bekman, and Ben Cerveny.

Souris and Jen as networking-ninjas will be relating their experience of engaging in social networks for fun and profit, while Ben and myself will be talking about social tools and how ‘supercolliders’ hack and transform them.

Looking forward to it.

Best of all, Silvio crafted these magnificent Mii’s for all of us!

If you recognise me from it, say hi!

Rough notes from Seymour Powell presentation, Singapore

February 28, 2008 moleitauLeave a comment

Saw Seymour Powell speak this afternoon. Basically, they gave a great presentation of ideas that aren’t that foreign to anyone practising interaction or product design, but as such still depressingly exotic to marketing, advertising and brand people… And let’s face it – you kind of automatically win if you end with “and here’s the spaceship we designed”…

in a very grand ballroom…
let?s just say that advertising people do their conferences very differently…

masterclass – from seymourpowell

intro by chris thomas -theme of conference is ?ideas with consequence?

design effectiveness
design council study – basket of companies that privilege design outperforms FTSE
effective design – is there any other kind?
it?s not art
david sainsbury – innovation = successful exploitation of new ideas.
brand – a series of promises that do not change over time (bernstein)

Voyage of the dawntreader – what is a star – – what it is, not what it?s made of.

Aston Martin example – ?power, beauty, soul?
?they?ve made a dreadful mistake but putting it on the dashboard.. I don’t want to be told!? (show, don’t tell)
?you don?t own it, it lives in the heart of the consumer?
brands taken and refracted and distorted by forces outside the brand
communications are become more and more fragmented
the product is where the brand keeps it?s promises – where the rubber hits the road.
?audi tt doesn’t need an ad – it is the ad? -john hegarty
the product is an ad that runs every time you pick it up.
even at the end of it?s life – when you discard it.
the brand can be redefined by the product (for good or for ill)
skoda – 10 years refining the product to redefine the brand.
is land-rover a brand or a product?
the dna of the brand is the vehicle, the product
design as a job of reasserting authority for a brand.

brands are far to important to entrust to brand managers
1.7 years is the average tenure of a brand manager
product cycles are typically 2-8years…

emotional ergonomics – you love to use it.
3d dimensional brands

phases of creativity: idea >belief > embodiment

old saw: ?a brief is a collection of the client?s prejudices? is true.

we don?t listen – we watch.
if you listen to focus groups you get post-rationlisation, not insight.
emergent behaviour comes from watching, and if you watch that you find the future.

if 72% of consumer decisions are made at point of sales then how come 72% of the budget isn’t spent there?

change.

?unless we build a receiver into the client, they can?t be read for the violence of the new?

push/pull activity – push from tech, pull from marketing.
poor comms between both usually.

over-ambition can be the death of innovation – the search for the big idea, the category killer
usually great innovation is more about a series of small ideas brought together in a new and orginal way

often innovation theory triumphs over practice – management goobledegook and voodoo. buzzword bingo.

embodying it doesn’t usually fall to the innovation consultants…

innovation sheep-dip – flawed but p.c. idea that everyone can be creative. some people are just more creative than others…. training isn?t always the answer.

good design is cheap, brilliant design is free.

process: gets you the unexpected but relevant solution

?crucible? events – melting point for alloying the points of view of marketing and technical.
embodying an idea is so important – sketching and drawing is crucial.

redesigning the steam iron for tefal
two small headaches from user observation – why do I have to fill it through a tiny hole, why is it always falling off

c.f. shelf-demonstrable

stand somewhere else to solve the problem from where you are used to – to get to the unexpected but relevant solution

new paradigms of product – how do you create them?

when we see something we don?t quite understand – your brain rifles through all the categories it knows and tries to find a match

businesses need to be a zoom lens to see the very small things that might disrupt the vision.

occupy yourself with the parts without losing sight of the whole.

businesses should ask ?why not? more than ?why?

– george bernard shaw quote

?how far do you want to dream?

shows virgin galactic video

they give extremely good talk – the confidence and passion is something to behold…

Petafloptimism

A matter of matter battles

Category: Conferences and events