If it walks like a singularity, and quacks like a singularity

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The always-thought-provoking Charlie Stross writes:

What kind of society are we likely to get if it turns out that yes, we’re hitting peak oil round about now, but that it’s possible to process random junk biomass into crude oil for $100 a barrel, and $1000 will buy you a machine that you plug into your laptop and that can make, well, just about any small macroscopic structure you can design, out of feedstock derived from biosynthetic crude oil or woodchips, or paper?

Fortune500 companies would be better off hiring science-fiction writers than MBA consultants right now.

RCA Future of Money project

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At the end of last year I had the pleasure of working on a project with the first and second year Design Interaction students at the RCA. It was sponsored by Intel’s People and Practices Group, extending and examining their work on the future of money.

The brief we put together had this question at it’s core:

“As the technology of e-money and currency advances, how will that effect the social and psychological dimensions associated with those technologies? What new behaviours, new dangers, new rituals, and new pleasures could emerge?”

RFID force-feedback transactions from chriswoebken on Vimeo.

It was a great experience, and very satisifying to now see all the finished work up on the web, and looking great. Amazing to see what they did with a very abstract brief, not much time and the handicap of a first-timer as one of the tutors…

Core77’s already written about it, and I’m hoping to see some some of the pieces in the RCA Final Show shortly.

Congratulations to all there on the work so far, and good luck for the final push!

My outboard brain = my walking city

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WALKING CITY, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Jonathan Feinberg emailed me and said “Inspired by your typographically sophisticated “hand-tooled” cloud, I came up with a novel way of cramming a bunch of words together.” which is underserved praise for me, and dramatically underselling what he’s acheived with Wordle.
It does the simple and much-abused thing of creating a tag-cloud, and executes it playfully and beautifully. There are loads of options for type and layout, and it’s enormous fun to fiddle with.
As I said back when Kevan Davies did his delicious phrenology visualiser, there is some apophenic pleasure in scrying your tag could and seeing the patterns there – so I was very pleased when my playing with Wordle returned me an Archigram-esque walking city of things I’ve found interesting.
Congrats to Jonathan on building and finally releasing Wordle!

T5: Expectations of agency

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I’m in Oslo for a few days, and to get there I went through Heathrow’s new and controversial Terminal Five. After all the stories, and Ryan’s talk on the service design snafus it’s experienced I approached my visit there with excitement and trepidation.
Excitement still, because it’s still a major piece of architecture by Richard Rogers and Partners – and sparkly new airports are, well, sparkly and new.
YMMV, especially as we were travelling off-peak, but – it was pretty calm and smooth sailing all the way. I’m guessing they’ve pulled out all the stops in order to get things on an even-keel.
Saw both pieces installed in the BA Club Lounges by Trokia (‘Cloud’ and ‘All the time in the world’), both of which were lovely – you can get to see them both without having to be a fancypants gold carder, which is good.

The thing that struck me though was the degree of technological automation of previously human-mediated process that were anticipated, designed and built – that then had to be retrofitted with human intervention and signage.
It’s a John Thackara rant waiting to happen, and that’s aside from all the environmental impacts he might comment on!



Terminal 5: Compensating for lack of agency, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

My favourite was the above sign added to the lifts that stop and start automatically, to make sure you understand that you can’t press anything. Of course, we’re trained to expect agency or at least the simulation of agency in lifts – keeping doors open, selecting floors, pressing our floor button impatiently and tutting to make the lift go faster. Remember that piece in James Gleick’s FSTR where lift engineers deliberately design placebo button presses to keep us impatient humans happy? People still kept pressing the type panels – me included!
To paraphrase Naoto Fukasawa: sometimes design dissolves in behaviour and then quickly sublimates into hastily-printed and laminated signage…

My talk at Adaptive Path’s MX conference: Battle For The Planet Of The Apes

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The Apes, originally uploaded by ED209uk.

I’m finally getting around to put some of the talks I gave last month in San Francisco online – the first of which being a talk I gave at Adaptive Path’s MX conference entitled: Battle For The Planet Of The Apes. Unfortuntely, slideshare seems to have eaten a few images, but I’ll try and correct that in coming days.
Brandon and Henning of AP had asked me to give a perspective on social networks and some of the design decision’s we’d taken on Dopplr – it ended up a bit more of a tongue-in-cheek critique of some of the prevailing idioms in the current YASNS boom and an appeal to step back to a broader view of social software…
Thanks to AP for the invite, and for the attendees of MX for their attention!

Unsettlers of Catan

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Aeros Airship
^ Photo: The Aeros Aeroscraft ML866 Concept

Imagine my surprise reading today’s Grauniad finding George Monbiot coming out as a fan of airships, and more broadly – of advanced technological solutions (“like most greens I’m prepared to try almost anything, as long as it works.” – really George? Shall we go properly nuclear then?)

I’ve long been Col. Blimp in arguments with m’colleague Cheathco on the future of global transport. George’ll be hot for space elevators next, then I’ll really have to find a new schtick, or make him my best mate.

Once I’d calmed down from the initial flush of general airship lust though – the point that stuck with me from the article was this:

“Paradoxically, the other major constraint could be an environmental one. Airships are one of several green technologies which might be killed by a shortage of materials. A new generation of solar panels relies on gallium and indium, whose global supplies appear close to exhaustion(8). The price of platinum, which is used in catalytic converters, has tripled over the past five years(9). Beyond a few natural gas fields in Texas, economically viable supplies of helium are rare; even there they might be exhausted in 50 years at current rates of use, or much faster if airships take off(10,11). If there is a God, he isn’t green.”

And that’s the worrying thing – this really seems like a game of what resource will run out – the cheap energy to do the R&D into The Gordelpus, the rare materials to make The Gordelpus, or the sociopolitical will to make The Gordelpus.

It’s like the early stages of a resource-trading game like Settlers of Catan.

If we can just get enough of the vital stuff, we’ll have a runaway advantage later in the play. Which bets shall we make with which resources in order to get that runaway multiplier before it’s too late in the game?

I guess I am with George after all – making some audacious bets mid-game looks pretty good right now.

It’s how we roll.

P.s.: “The Gordelpus” is Olaf Stapledon‘s quasi-nuclear magical/religious/scientific endless-power mcguffin of the First Men in his awe-inspiring Last and First Men.

From Chapter 4 of “Last and First Men” (Project Gutenberg version)

A century after the founding of the first World State a rumour began to be heard in China about the supreme secret of scientific religion, the awful mystery of Gordelpus, by means of which it should he possible to utilize the energy locked up in the opposition of proton and electron. Long ago discovered by a Chinese physicist and saint, this invaluable knowledge was now reputed to have been preserved ever since among the elite of science, and to be ready for publication as soon as the world seemed fit to possess it. The new sect of Energists claimed that the young Discoverer was himself an incarnation of Buddha, and that, since the world was still unfit for the supreme revelation, he had entrusted his secret to the Scientists.

Bonus (self)link: Olaf Stapledon’s amazing timelines he drew up while conceiving the book.

Skateboarding and The City

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Skateboarding and The City, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

“The triumph of non-labour, however, does not entail an absence of effort but an even more profound redefinition of what ‘production’ might mean, and it is here too that skateboarding strikes at the heart of the business city. At first sight, skateboarders’ labour produces no ‘products’ beyond the moves skaters make, a ‘commodity’ exchangeable only by means of performative action. Furthermore, skateboarders, like students, offer a potential labour force but they deny this by undertaking seemingly meaningless productions, and so appear to waste effort and time. But that ‘principle of economy’ which sees a ‘waste’ of energy as abnormal is itself a reduction of life to mere survival. Skateboarding, in contrast, undertakes a release of energy that either creates or modifies space, espousing play, art and festival.”

– Prof Iain Boarden, Skateboarding and The City