Tricorders

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Combine these two:

  • The Age: Deriving images of lives in Melbourne [thanks to Margaret for sending that]

    “An experimental art work at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image is turning ordinary people into multimedia artists.

    The combined exhibition and authoring engine, called D3, which allows users to produce their own animated tour of the city, is proving a hit with visitors.

    Once the piece, called a ‘Derive’, is completed, it can be stored for later use; its makers hope they will be available this year. Inspired as it is by the writings of situationist philosopher Guy Debord, D3 is somewhat abstract, with the images managing to be both familiar and strange – photographs of parts of buildings, graffiti and piles of discarded objects – and the words are what Debord himself would call “pleasingly vague – car, backpacker, why, heavy and so on”.”

  • Smartmobs: SenSay, a ‘Context-Aware’ Cell Phone

    “The SenSay system uses four primary sensors: a microphone to pick up the user’s voice, another to monitor noise around the user, a light sensor and an accelerometer.”

I like the idea of a personal sensing device… a passive tricorder that can use its impression of the environment around you to adjust it’s user experience, or to create a platform to communicate a specific story, moment, thought or feeling that can’t possibly be separated from the place you are when you have it.

A sharer of haeccity.

Time pieces

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Graham Hicks of IDEO has started a blog… with a very tasteful, spare design; lifted by some lovey touches:

“As a way to embed a little more sense of time into the site the colors of links change with the time of day. They move through 24 shades, one for each hour of the day. The link color will become blue (midnight), green (morning), orange (afternoon), and red (evening), based on Pacific time.”

» http://www.grahamhicks.com/

Hold the frontpage!

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A story in this morning’s MediaGuardian on whether changes in web-user behaviours mean that designs (and redesigns) of “portal”-type homepages for ISPs or other online services still serve a purpose.

There’s little analysis in this story of what might be changing user behaviour: links being exchanged over IM networks or email, the omnipotence of Google, personal weblogs as gateways to the web or even the burgeoning use of RSS?

More evidence for the arguement to “turn your website inside out “ – © Simon Waldman.

» MediaGuardian: The front-page dilemma

Our masters, the petunias.

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Alex Wright has been reading Michael Pollan’s “Botany of Desire”.

“Pollan, an environmental writer and frequent contributor to the New York Times magazine, has constructed a dark and slightly unsettling drama of our species’ relationship with so-called “domesticated” plants.

The book poses a radical conceit: that much as our species likes to think of itself as masters of the natural world – as evidenced in our invention of agriculture – it may just be the other way around: perhaps it is the plants who have domesticated us?”

Rocks are slow life – plants are slightly faster – but everything’s in charge of us.

» Alex Wright: The Botany of Desire

Legume theory

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Soybeans solve the free-riders problem:

“A new study shows that soybean plants can apply sanctions against symbiotic bacteria when the bugs don’t deliver their fair share of nitrogen.”

“The work… portrays symbiotic relationships “not as a simple, friendly interaction where every party happily gains, but as trade with a dark side: ‘Provide the resource I require and I will reciprocate; do not, and suffer dire consequences.'”

BRIC: The Dark Side of Cooperation
[Thanks Fiona…]

Right of reply?

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Nice piece on Matthew “Saving the web, one site at a time” Sommerville in the Independent this week:

“Ever got really frustrated with a website? So frustrated that you decided to redesign it by creating your own interface to the information that it offers? Matthew Somerville has. Between completing his Oxford maths degree and starting his new job in October, he’s put together simpler, more accessible versions of the Odeon cinemas site, National Rail’s online enquiries and live departure boards, BT’s directory enquiries, and even the Hutton Inquiry. He’s got rid of such time-consuming hi-tech puffery as big graphics, JavaScript, frames, cookies, pop-up windows and drop-down menus. And in each case, his version is faster and easier to use.”

In the piece it goes on to quote the client at the Odeon (who apparently will no longer press Sommerville to take the site down – good!) as saying:

“Not only is his website an infringement of Odeon’s copyright, it is also confusing to Odeon customers.”

Good grief. He did it for free, because your site was confusing him, a potential Odeon customer. He’s at least given you a stick to beat your agency with for nothing! He’s doing your thinking for you, man! Talking of the agency – I’d love to know what the designers there think, if any of them are reading… Right of reply in the comments field below…

The Orange Robed Monk

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From a treasure-trove of semiotic fun found by Peterme and Andrew Zolli:

“We know that as an agrarian society could be represented via the conventions of the landscape – so too were the industrial era and the modern era. But how might we begin to conceive of the era that has been variously referred to as hypermodern, postmodern, supermodern, global, or turbo-capitalist? What landscapes can we turn to here for enlightenment and deconstruction? We offer television advertising as a source of landscape images to study. What can be said about how Capital conceptualizes spaces as landscapes in its advertising?”

It also remarks on Monking – a name I’ve tended to give to the practice of inserting Tibetan / Oriental / Zen Buddhist monks into fictions and images to signify that something timeless and wierd and other is goin’ down. Alias was guilty of this, as was Tomb-Raider#1: the narrative played on – no real dependence on the monks or their beliefs other than to give a backdrop of kindly enlightenment – a thin Zen-eer atop the story if you like…

“An orange-robed Tibetan monk – currently the numero uno universal signifier of knowledge in the information age (the use of the monk as a signifier is similar to how the green-eyed tree frog was used to signify the environmental movement in advertising) — is joined to the word “knowledge.”

» Landscapes of Global Capital: The Infolightenment

Can we fix it?

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Jonathan Glancey get all used-universe on us:

“Today, many of us are unable, or unwilling, to change a fuse or even patch a bicycle tyre, much less repair a locomotive or build a ship. We are fast becoming a nation ignorant of how things are made or work even as the nation’s infrastructure crumbles around us. Who cares? What excites us, as the opening of the new-look Birmingham Bull Ring proves, is the passive consumption of shiny new gewgaws, most produced abroad, rather than the making of the practical machinery that gets us to our glamorous new shops in the first place.”

»Guardian: Can we fix it? No we can’t

Ministry of Space

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Space stuff. When I left architecture skool, the web beckoned – but for a mad month or so I was trying to apply for a masters programme in Space Architecture and Engineering, which I seem to remember was in Houston.