Recently in interactivity = shopping? Category

Image Node, my old Burning Man camp, are purveyors of fine minimal techno and live video mixing. They are now selling, in true Image Node fashion, a ridiculously easy way to get ridiculously blinky. Lovingly designed in Brooklyn, the Nodeblinky retails for $40 or $80 assembled. Proceeds benefit the Node's art projects at Burning Man this year.

UNSEEN
was a project by Marc Böhlen and Natalie Tan

UNSEEN is a nature interpretation center with second thoughts. Set in the Reford Gardens of Grand-Métis on the Gaspé Peninsula of eastern Québec, the multi-camera real time machine vision system observes select plants indigenous to the region. The Dogwood, the Wild Sarsaparilla, the Harebell, the Foamflower, the Wild Columbine, the Garden Columbine, the Alpine Woodsia, the Lowbush Blueberry and the Canadian Burnet are under continued observation during the entire summer. Using data analysis and classification techniques, the system searches for instances of these plants. Short texts depict factual knowledge on the select plants. Over the course of the summer, however, the flavour of the texts changes. As the initially sparse garden grows luscious, the system alters the nature of the texts from descriptive to hypothetical, confronting the visitor with imagined future plant scenarios. Which types of knowing are valid here? UNSEEN is a patient observer designed to make you unfamiliar with plants.

One of the things I like about UNSEEN is that it attempts to bring about unfamiliarity, rather than a sense of authority and expertise. Nor does it attempt to create "empathy" with plants, another goal I'm finding more dubious as this project goes on.

Tod grew up in Las Vegas. He said, "Most people go back to their childhood home and think that it looks smaller. Las Vegas just looks bigger."

Some limited impressions.

1) I don't know what bugs me more: traditional booth babes in minidresses or "spokesmodel" types in tailored pants who, despite looking remarkably like extra-attractive junior marketing people, are still basically spokesmodels.

2) Much of home automation marketing appears to be a tautology: "these home control products are good because they allow you to control your home"

3) My, that lack of atmospheric haze really does make it very difficult to judge distances, doesn't it? Everything seems to be equally gigantic, from the massive casino signs to the 100'' LCDs.

Okay. So we just got renter's insurance, which is very reassuring and covers all of our computer equipment, including laptops. Mike just asked a very good question, though: what about DRM'd media? Let's just say (hypothetically speaking) that I bought all my songs from iTunes at 99¢ a pop. Let's just say. So what if both my laptop and my iPod are destroyed in a horrible, cataclysmic...hurricane? Given that digital music is supposed to be actual property (that can actually be stolen, etc) does renter's insurance cover the $10,000 in lost songs? I can't find anything online to answer this question.

But DIFRWEAR's wallets are looking very practical (probably more practical than this stuff), given today's article in the NYT:

But in tests on 20 cards from Visa, MasterCard and American Express, the researchers here found that the cardholder’s name and other data was being transmitted without encryption and in plain text. They could skim and store the information from a card with a device the size of a couple of paperback books, which they cobbled together from readily available computer and radio components for $150.

And because the cards can be read even through a wallet or an item of clothing, the security of the information, the researchers say, is startlingly weak. “Would you be comfortable wearing your name, your credit card number and your card expiration date on your T-shirt?” Mr. Heydt-Benjamin, a graduate student, asked.

It's true, though, that even RFID-blocking wallets won't address identity and mail theft.

Thanks to the fun@sims mailing list for making the connection.

Every month we get the IDSA magazine Innovation, and every month I go ballistic.

Every. Month.

Innovation isn't a magazine so much as 100+ page promotional flyer that happens to have glossy pages. It's a thin collection of "articles" promoting one or another product concept where the text is usually written by the product designers. So the articles aren't, you know, reliable reviews. Or even sometimes all that grammatical. But I let that go.

The problem is that every month Innovation features easily a hundred images of products, or product concepts. They're really beautiful too - slick 3D renderings, intensely colorful photographs. And they come fast and furious, sometimes five or six to a spread. The images are typically silhouetted, just the object floating on the white space of the page. Sometimes there's a little Photoshopped-in shadow, just to give a sense of dimensionality.

But here's the weird thing: there's almost never any people in the shots. Or physical contexts of use. It's like the products (most of which are intimately related to the body in some way, like clothing or mobile phones or glucometers) exist absolutely independently from the people and places that inspired their creation. They are a sculptor's dream: pure form disconnected from the messy realities that dent brushed aluminum and put thumbprints on chrome. The white space of the traditional art gallery has become the white space of the magazine page. It just whispers of...

...pointless self-absorption, frankly.

I know this critique is nothing new. But c'mon. In the 174 pages of the "2006 Yearbook of Industrial Design Excellence," there were 37 pictures of people. Which makes for .2 pictures of people per page. That includes images of disembodied appendages like hands, feet, and heads. It also includes figurative representations of people, such as sketches and line drawings. (Like everybody's favorite representational trick: the blank line drawing composited with photographic imagery). It does not include photographs of the designers themselves, unless those designers appeared to be physically engaged with the product. Most product images had no images of humans; the 37 images I counted came disproportionately from a few articles, such as the one by ZIBA on their work with Lenovo (10 images!) which was in fact classified in the "research" section.

The problem is that the democratization of access to design tools (thanks, Usenet!) means that more and more people can make pretty pictures of product concepts, write up their own glowing descriptions of how cool their idea is, and email it all into industry mags like Innovation. So I look for proof that there's something else besides formal innovation. Something like: a hint of honesty about the product's shortcomings. Or: a suggestion of engagement with the physical experience of the product's form. Or: scenarios of use that show me what advantage it brings.

I've fought this battle for a while, and the problem seems to be that many industrial designers feel that they're being judged on the perfection of the physical forms they make - so documentation of projects emphasizes form and finish over all. I've been told by one who would know that storytelling and narrative are now at the basis of many industrial design curricula, but you'd never know it from Innovation.

Sketching in Hardware 06 - "a summit on the design of/with physical computing toolkits" - has just finished.

SIH1 is a conversation about developing and using tools for prototyping intelligent devices, a weekend-long participatory sequel to the talk Matt Cottam and Mike Kuniavsky presented at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference this year ...With this gathering we aim to bring together a small group of people developing technology, designing products and experiences, or teaching industrial and interaction design with physical computing. The goal is to spend a weekend in a highly creative environment and discuss the ideas, methods, challenges and potential of toolkits designed for prototyping physical computing. It will be an opportunity for toolkit developers to talk to designers and educators who use their tools, for educators to meet with other educators and developers, and for designers to meet with the folks who make the hardware they use.

I helped Mike do some of the last-minute set up, so I feel a just a little bit more like an organizer than an attendee.

My notes on the talks follow in the extended entry. As always, my own responses are in brackets. I'll probably post more completed thoughts soon.

Right now, I'm participating in the Breaking the Game symposium, in the Overclocking the City track. Here's a (slightly revised) version of my proposal:

"Overclocking is the practice of making a component run at a higher clock speed than the manufacturer's specification. The idea is to increase performance for free or to exceed current performance limits, but this may come at the cost of stability." {Wikibooks}

As a sociotechnical practice, overclocking emerges from a desire for success by the terms of technology marketing: the newest, the cheapest, the fastest. On the one hand, overclocking emerges from an obsession with speed and a desire to stress a system to its limits. Overclocking is an ambivalent act, bringing instability along with speed. On the other hand, overclockers deny the authority of the manufacturer to control the use of the hardware. Overclocking can be seen as creative misuse, voiding the warranty in an excess of imagination (which can include submerging computers in liquid nitrogen or heating oil). What would an overclocked public look like? A sped-up, fast-forward version of the present, with social connections made and dropped at ever higher rates? Ever more noise and ever less silence? Play not as pleasure but as highstakes test?

In game culture, overclockers are not necessarily the best players. Instead, they delve into the infrastructure that makes play possible. Overclockers are the plumbers of the infrastructure, tinkering with the cooling and heating mechanisms of a little city called the CPU. And as the Electronic Frontiers Foundation reminds us, "architecture is policy." And policy regulates action.

Looking at games and public spaces, overclocking appears as both a warning and an inspiration. Online games cannot be "public" in the old civic sense of public - they run on servers owned by individual or companies, using software licensed or bought. There is always a gateway to their entry. In Second Life, an online virtual world, inhabitants forced change on Second Life's owners by "publicly" protesting - setting their avatars on fire in locations frequented by newbies. They were able to do so because Second Life built that freedom to act into the architecture of their code. When we discuss the policies and actions in spaces that extend from the digital to the physical and back again, overclocking reminds us to look more closely at the infrastructures underlying play spaces, and question more closely the freedoms granted within their architectures.

How could anyone resist an article with a headline like, "Toy makers hawk robotic playmates"? Apparently, at least 75% of the toys at this year's American International Toy Fair will have microchips in them, including:

Amazing Allysen from Playmates Toys Inc., a companion doll to last year's Amazing Amanda, a surprise hit last holiday season. The new doll, aimed at an older girl ages 9 and 10 years old, recognizes and responds to key words and phrases with lifelike facial expressions and real emotions.

I need hardly tell you how gross it's going to be when the first 15-year-old hacks THAT doll.

Cuddle Chimp, from Hasbro, the latest in the company's FurReal Friends collection responds to touch by snuggling into the owner's arms and emits happy sounds.

It's part of a toy line called "Fur Real Friends." According to Amazon, it also makes "realistic baby chimp sounds." I have no comment.

And here's your obligatory dose of hype:

"Children are migrating to consumer electronics faster than toy companies can take them there," said Sean McGowan, a toy analyst at Harris Nesbitt.

addendum from Mike:
The NYT has bested this entry with an article titled, "Mommy, Help Me Download 'Farmer in the Dell' to My MP3 Player" about a digicam + mp3 player for kids age 3 and up. Yeah.

Latest flickr obsession: the what's in your bag? pool, filled with amazing pictures from around the world of, well, the contents of bags.

What's in your bag? is a gateway drug - it led me to the equally fascinating flickr subculture of teenagers from the Middle East, especially the UAE and Dubai. Note the characteristic mix of Arabic, Xanga-style English spelling, and total teenage slang.

Release1 is a Boston-based design collective that has sponsored some great exhibits on critical design and marketing. They don't seem to have done anything recently, but I especially liked the 2003 Disturbdelightdesign exhibit, which introduced me to some older work (from 2001) I hadn't noticed at the time, such as:

Carla Ross-Allen's Fatwear and Skinthetics series

and Kirsten White and Ken Nicol's Laundry Carpet (see above left) and

Jonathan Fairman's mode-shift (see above right).

Sadly, the Release1 website is a Flash-based atrocity: hideous to navigate, unsearchable, with lots of hidden sections and untraceable steps. Still, the projects are worth the frustration - for many of them the website provided the only online documentation I could find. It's a pity that the site prioritizes showy navigation over supporting their exhibitions, though. It's been a while since I've seen Flash used so unhelpfully in an interaction design portfolio site.

I've been thinking a lot about shopping recently (obviously).

Shopping is one of the great all-time urban pleasures (that and parades with impressive floats). I like cities, and I like shopping. A lot. As a theater designer, I was a professional shopper, and have kept the habit of always being on the lookout for things that might possibly be useful or pleasing to someone, somewhere. I enjoy it, but it doesn’t really do any good because I never share my finds with anyone.

I have an experiment to propose. I’ve been playing with a Flickr photo pool called windowshop, which I was using to show photos of shop windows. It seems to have some interest. So I just started a new group called magpie to see what happens if the windowshopping is a little more shopping focused and a little more group oriented.

Here’s how I described it on Flickr:

Magpie is a collectively created shopping guide to local stores - wherever you are. It's intended to support small, indepedently-owned businesses that we might not otherwise know about.

Here's how it works:

1) take a photo of something for sale that you think other people might want and post it to the group pool
2) give enough information in the subject field that any viewer can figure out how to find that object again. You can give the full address of the store, or just the name of the store and the city in which it's located. If you want to be nice, add the price and any other comments.
3) tag the photo to help other people in the group search more effectively

AND

4) tag other people's photos as well - the more tags, the easier it will be to find what you're looking for - and help out small, local businesses in the process.

At the moment I’m working on making my own search functions to extend the somewhat limited default set on the Flickr site.

Now that Thanksgiving has officially given way to all-hands-on-deck shopping madness, the NYT has weighed in with a special section, no less, on retail.

Things That I Learned, by little Lizzie Goodman, age 28

1. the continuing importance of “old-fashioned” physical installations as guarantors of continuity and trustworthiness:
   

   Melissa Payner-Gregor, chief executive of Bluefly.com, agrees that old-fashioned stores have their advantages.... "The consumer feels that if there's a flagship store it lends credibility to the whole thing," she said.

   
   


2. The high correlation between the introduction of digital technologies into an interaction and the probability that reporters will characterize said interaction as “seamless.”
   


3. Malls apparently are finally turning into full-time communities:
   

   Department stores have been replaced by multiplex movie theaters and Cheesecake Factories, with condominiums clustered on the outskirts.

   
   

Seamlessness, or lack thereof

I’m especially interested in the adjective “seamless.” Significantly, it’s repeated twice in the article – strange for an adjective that’s usually applied to computing, especially tangible and mobile computing.

I spent much of last summer studying the rhetoric of ubiquitous / tangible / mobile / pervasive computing: “seamless” isn’t an innocent word. It usually indicates a kind of optimism about the ability of certain (mobile, pervasive, tangible, etc) technologies to deliver constant, homogeneous experiences and the desirability of doing so. It’s a loaded word, especially in an article about the relationship between e-commerce and physical shopping.

An article that begins and ends with an anecdote about the difficulties of shipping a rug bought from a website doesn’t suggest that the movement from physical to online shopping is seamless in any sense of the word. It suggests that such movement has become prevalent. There’s a difference, and it’s a really annoying difference for all those people trying to buy and sell rugs. As with the article, it’s easier to declare that an experience is to be “seamless” than actually to make it so.

What the article actually suggested to me is something that Matthew Chalmers brought up a while ago, building on some key ideas from Mark Weiser:

Making everything the same is easy; letting everything be itself, with other things, is hard.

The question of "being itself" is harder than it sounds. Shopping is a good example of a larger point: that the transitions between physical and virtual experiences (especially socially complex and emotionally-bound experiences) aren’t ever going to be seamless in the way that the rhetoric promises. These transitions are necessarily noticeable and meaningful because they depend on the way people physically experience the world. Which is to say that Payner-Gregor has a point: the physical world is believable in a way websites aren’t. And that, unlike websites, malls and mall space are swiftly becoming places where we can make homes. No matter what you think of the, um, ubiquity of shopping in American culture right now, the transitions between even seemingly-united states of consumption are meaningful.

In honor of seamless shopping, some more references

Brick-and-Click shopping

Koolhaas’ Guide to Shopping

Prada, Property, Praxis, by Adam Greenfield

Fragments from Benjamin’s Arcades

The evolution of the shopping mall

Malcolm Gladwell on the birth of the mall

Woodward, I., Emmison, M., and Smith, P.  (2000)  'Consumerism, disorientation and postmodern space: a modest test of an immodest theory', in British Journal of Sociology, Vol 51, No 2: 339 – 54 (skip to the last para)

Please Steal Christmas

Katherine reminds me to post about BYOB, which will be a demo at Ubicomp2004 this year.

BYOB is a modular set of interactive textile squares that can be combined to build a bag (see above) that can function in multiple ways: as an alert, a network visualizer, etc.

When modules are snapped together to form an object, they become part of a network and begin to communicate with people, other objects, and their environment.

While admittedly I think Katherine is right - do we really need more applications where the ambient pretty lights go blinky-blink? - the project does nicely evoke the long history of modular design and individual adaptation in the textile arts.

If computer-supported cooperative work is your thing - or especially if it really isn't - please consider submitting a position paper to the workshop I'm running at CSCW 2004 with danah boyd and Michele Chang:

This workshop will address the many ways by which online presentations of self have been - and could be - constructed. In the absence of the body as a source of accountability and social legibility, individuals project a sense of self through multiple layers of mediation, including email addresses, graphic avatars, "friend lists," and results from search engines. How can we use the body in a mediated world? Or alternately, how can we promote rich modes of interaction that do not rely on the illusion of physical presence?

The deadline for submissions is September 20. There's more info at the website.

C'mon along. It'll be big fun.

Yes, these eye shadows do look a lot like iPod minis, which look a lot like Kyocera cameras, don't they? And I think I saw that yellow car on the way down to Palo Alto yesterday.

It's become a kind of a truism to point out that Pantone owns product aesthetics. But in the spirit of reconfirming the obvious, I point you towards this inadvertently hilarious forecast from 2003 to get a sense of how managed "good taste" is these days, and how peculiar the interplay between politics, consumption, and design can become.

Walch urges graphic designers to "remember yellow, always a color of movement and youthful energies, and symbolic of a bright future, ideal for contemporary graphics." And Melanie Wood captures an emerging national mood when she asserts that "we want to get the war behind us, start anew and have fun again. Colors that refresh and rejuvenate will lead the way with innocent tones of pink and peach giving us a sense of freshness and a promise of tomorrow."

I hope you considered the cultural implications before you bought that pink iPod. And that eyeshadow. Not to mention the car.

I feel like Janis Joplin asking for a Mercedes-Benz, but when I see the lovely furniture from Front I just think, surely there's someone somewhere who needs to make me some amends.

I especially like the table that stumbles at first, then slowly learns to stand on its own. Its knobbly joints make it look like a colt - or what I imagine a colt would look like, as I've only ever seen them in photos.

Front are young. Front are Swedish. And it looks like their stuff actually exists as promised.

The version of MT installed on the NYU server is clearly a relic from more innocent days, when comment spam either didn't exist or wasn't a big enough problem to build in defenses against. Remember those golden days? Since anything that can be spammed, will be, at this point releasing any application without built-in spam guards is a usability no-no akin to not supporting copy and paste.

For the past two days, I've been getting 100+ spam comments/day. Since this blog is hosted on an NYU server, I don't have access to install a spam filter. This has never been a big problem before, but apparently I just hit the spam tipping point and am a prime target. And given the unwieldiness of MT's comment-deleting process, I just can't click fast enough. Which means that, unfortunately, you might be hit with some unpleasant comments. When I'm deleting the comments, I actually have to hold my left hand against the screen to block out the offending text (bringing in Disney characters and explicit sex acts is just unbelievably low, even for a spammer).

Hopefully sometime soon we'll get a filter running here. I am not Joi Ito, and I don't have 5 hours to spend every day on this blog. In fact, with a 2hr commute to Palo Alto, I have considerably less time. So the more time I spend deleting nasty spam, the less time I have to do anything like writing. Which is sad. And sadly, I'm disabling commenting until further notice. Given that people don't actually comment on this blog that often, it's not a major disaster. But it's not the way I wanted to run things. Send me an email if you've got the urge to say hi.

Everytime I wait for my luggage at an airport, I wonder about the ubiquitous Smarte Cartes. What makes them so smart? The carte itself is just a modified dolly - there's nothing smarte about it. The smarts here are actually all contextual - they only exist because the carte rack is in the right place, at the right price. Me, I think the smarte parte is the creators' business plan.

If even these profoundly dumb pieces of metal are a little smart, then what about the "smart furniture" in Mike's new manifesto (complete PDF here) It jibes with much of the ubicomp discussions (cf: context-awareness, augmented artifacts, etc) just using the mindset and vocabulary of design, not scientific research.

Mike thinks smart furniture is "better." Unfortunately, "better" can be a slippery concept. For Mike, "better" means: "reduce(s) complexity." Or it can mean, "more comfortable." Or also: "more powerful and more easy." Or: acting "more elegantly and efficiently." Those statements, now that I think of it, articulate a set of values common to most designers: simplicity, comfort, power, ease. And speaking as one kind of designer, I tend to agree with him.

Of course, speaking as a longtime smart-ass, I want to bring up all sorts of potential discomforts and complications. I always do.

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
- Elizabeth Bishop

This entry (and the one after it) got lost somehow when I was wildly deleting spam. I've got no idea what I did to them, and there's no backup for it. Oh, well. No tragedy. Yet I somehow feel like I should record the disappearance...

There was a Wired News article today about drivers who want to reprogram their cars that reminded me of my friend Paul�s Prius.

Cars are still a novelty to me, and cars with 9�� LCDs in them are still more novel (noveller?). But Paul has gotten over the shock of the new, and pointed out all sorts of features in the music interface that�d he be happy to add for himself...if there were some sort of accessible API. Which begs the question, �Well, why not?� Obviously, we might not want Paul reprogramming his brakes on the go. But it�s perfectly reasonable to build in some tools for customizing and extending one�s in-car media player. This is probably illegal, but let�s just entertain the idea for a moment.

�Car chippers� (modern day hotrodders) are hacking their Volkswagens and Corvettes for better performance. But since at this point Americans live in their cars, it seems like a short step towards also tinkering with the entertainment system to get more information about your CDs, to prompt you when your favorite dj is on, etc. This could be a terrible idea - do we really need more people futzing around with their radios at 65mph? But it�s not like the existing Prius screen design and functionality isn�t dangerously futzy already. �Why is there no pause button?� asked Paul. �Why is the volume control on the screen and the track forward-backward buttons on the dashboard?� I couldn�t really give him a good answer.

As the Wired article points out, there�s more at stake than just Paul�s CD collection. Cars are increasingly equipped with the processing power of PCs � but not the debugging capabilities. Instead, car manufacturers are designing cars that can only be troubleshot with the help of expensive scanners � which usually only car dealerships own. So they both take a bite out of the profits of independent mechanics, and force drivers to pay to get enigmatic warning lights diagnosed and turned off. It seems a little counterproductive. Why alienate your two most enthusiastic user populations (mechanics and car chippers) as well as a substantial population of less committed drivers who don�t want to pay $120 to get a minor fix every month or so?

The blurring of boundaries between automobile and PC brings new and troubling significance to the phrase �fatal error.� I�m on the point of buying a car, and anything that ratchets up my bill or my anxiety levels is a deal-breaker. I mean, if you were forced to spend $120 bimonthly to have an official Microsoft or Apple tech fix your computer, wouldn�t you consider that a major, major software problem? And if your computer didn�t tell you what the problem actually was but instead just flashed its LEDs enigmatically, wouldn�t that also be a major, major problem? So why is this somehow okay in a KIA?

Which leads me, inevitably, to the incipient dyspepsia that is the by-women, for-women Volvo concept car (hereafter ironically referred to as �FWBW�) Unlike cars with unhelpful and expensive warning lights, FWBW was apparently designed to completely frustrate any action the driver might take to maintain the car herself.

Bill Dill, a cinematographer and senior filmmaker in residence at the American Film Institute, uses a laser measurer to size up film locations before shoots. But when it comes to setting focus, he still prefers a tape measure because it's a bit more tangible.

"You don't know if the measure is correct," Mr. Dill said, "but I immediately know when a tape measure has a twist in it." (NYT)

That's the hell of designing for appropriate feedback, isn't it? It's not just knowing not just that the measurements are off, but also why. Because what's the point of measuring twice if you can't trust the tape measure?

Picking up the call from the excellent city of sound, I remind everyone that Audioscrobbler is super, and that it could use some money for better hardware.

This seems to be the week/season for launching city-wide games in New York - Michele and my game is launching soon, Andrea's game New York Snap Exchange, for PsyGeoConflux ...and on the corporate side, R/GA just put out the Nike-licious Operation 6453.

They're all imagining very different New Yorks -- my game invokes the history of street gangs, Snap Exchange riffs on (okay, very very loosely) the mercantile ethic of the New York Stock Exchange, and Operation 6453 uses the language and visuals of, um, urban guerrilla warfare* (check out the Flash intro, and you'll see what I mean).

New York is large enough to accommodate all of our games - and more. What's important here is the creation of new routes through the city streets - and through our imaginations. New routes can create new maps, and new maps can help us create new cities.

Now the city would move like a map you were drawing; now you would begin to live your life like a book you were writing. Called forth by a street or a building, an ensemble of gestures might imply that a different city had to be built or an old one overthrown. � Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces

*I just have to say that I find a "recon" themed game in the time of Fallujah and Abu Ghraib a little ... difficult.

Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book � in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment �Benjamin, �Einbahnstra�e

via Seth

Benjamin is talking about print, of course � but I of course apply it to design. Some of his particularly evocative phrases (�this prompt language,� �the inconspicuous forms,� �equal to the moment�) suggest the kind of �just in time� and �just enough� interactions that could work for and within the transitory contexts and brief needs of an what Benjamin calls an "active community� and I might call a "mobile" one. Why write a book when all you really need is a flyer stapled to a telephone pole?

This weeks' Sunday Styles section will have an article on "big games" - citywide gaming - focusing on PacManhattan. It gets at a lot of the fun and excitement of playing in the city, and there are some great shots of Dennis Crowley running around Washington Square Park dressed as PacMan.

The game that Michele and I have been working on got a brief plug, which was nice. Though I do wish the reporter hadn't described it as the way in which "corporations are getting in on the act." I mean, fer chrissakes, it's only two researchers and a developer and it began a year ago as a master's thesis for the very same program that produced PacManhattan.

I mean, it's good to get a little press. I'm just a little down about how the game got spun.

------>
Later: Michele and I just had a long discussion at lunch about the various aspectness of "bigness" that these "big" games might have: big in terms of the physical distance covered? big in terms of the social networks they rely on? big in terms of the telecom infrastructure (cell phones, GPS, etc) required to support them? The article has one definition, but there's more there...

And on the interactivity is just shopping front, there's been some sort of historic price point boundary crossed when Coke can afford to run a promo contest involving a phone built into a...wait for it...12 pack. The idea is that you find the "phone," push a button, and then are instantly connected to a Coke rep who tells you what you've won. (via geowanking) It seems, crazily, like a peculiarly American promo: wouldn't the Europeans just use SMS?

This reminds me, of course, of my artist/designer friend Dan's interaction design portfolio, which has a cell phone built it, so that it performs the neat trick of automatically calling him when the prospective employer opens it up. Unfortunately, that also means he has to carry around his cellphone wherever he goes, including (on particularly anticipatory days) the shower... (Oh, and btw: Dan needs a new job. If anyone knows of a place looking for a tangible interface designer...)

Just saw, in Vienna, two very different projects commenting obliquely on the desire for immersion in a distant time or place - both the appeal and the power of sound to provide a momentary forgetfulness of its impossibility.

One, RAW, by Stephan Agamanolis, Joelle Bitton, and Matthew Karau uses still photographs from a digital camera accompanied by a minute of sound recorded from before and after the shutter clicks closed. Rather than being the primary referent, the still image becomes something like punctuation to the sounds - ambient or narrative - that establish the particularity of that recorded moment. The sound complements the image, rather than merely annotating it. The images and sound - from Mali and Paris especially - are raw - and beautiful in their conviction that the beauty of everyday life continues around and between the moments when we're recording it.

The second project I saw right before I was due to leave Vienna - Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet, a sound installation in a shabby, dusty hall at the back of an art school.

Her own website describes it best:

Janet Cardiff�s new large scale work, Forty Part Motet, is based around the music Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis, and is a sculpturally-conceived sound piece, in which forty separately-recorded voices are played back through forty speakers.
Janet Cardiff�s work combines sound, movement and environment; the viewer/listener often proactively moves through the space activating sounds and unfolding narratives. Forty Part Motet allows the audience to experience sound from the viewpoint of the choir by physically involving them in the piece. When listening to live music the traditional position is to be at the front, looking on. In Forty Part Motet each speaker unit becomes a mouth; the audience unravels the composition by intimately moving amongst the speakers and hearing harmonies change as if singers were standing next to them. It allows sound to be heard as a changing construct, to be interpreted quite differently, to be carefully considered in a sculptural way.

I walked into the large, shabby room - very dark after the bright noon sun outside. It seemed inordinately dusty and echoing, the room - more like an abandoned ballroom or empty church than an art school gallery. There were 40 speakers in a wide circle in the middle, and each was singing in its own voice. I walked around the circle for a long time, putting my cheek so close to the speaker that I could hear each singer's minute gasps for breath in full song, and even the quality of their silences between words. Then the song ended. There was a brief pause, and then we could hear the singers begin again from the beginning - the real beginning, before the motet started, when they were all just ordinary people having ordinary conversations in a recording studio in England, sometime in the past.

I don't know what I felt there in the large empty room; I do know that there was something important in starting the piece before the "performance" officially began - something important in insisting that the almost over-the-top romanticism of the empty gallery filled with classically trained voices be compared with the intense everydayness of the moments before they began to sing, and we began to listen.

q3apd, by delire + pix, uses player location, view angle, weapon state etc in Quake as an input to Pure Date (which, FYI, is an audio tool). Different mods can be used for different kinds of av performance.

Then there's Michael Portnoy's Bierz Ulice (This Block Is On) - a month-long set of games played out on a street in Warsaw that turn it into a "secret playground" of surreal interactions with strangers. My favorite:

GET A FREE POSTCARD FROM BEHIND THE SECOND DOOR OF CHMIELNA 9, MUZA. GO SIT IN THE LOBBY AT CHMIELNA 15 .
A)WRITE RUMORS ABOUT THE STREET AND LEAVE IT IN THE EMPTY POSTCARD RACK OR
B)WRITE INSTRUCTIONS FOR A CONVERSATION OR INTERACTION BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE (EX: "HELLO STRANGERS! PLEASE TALK ABOUT..., "), WALK UP TO TWO PEOPLE TOGETHER ON THE STREET OR SEATED IN A CAFE. GREET THEM, HAND THEM THE CARD AND DEPART.

Compare Both of these (yes, extremely dissimilar) projects create performances using games and place. Contrast For the former, playing a game (QuakeIII) creates a sense of movement within and between engineered virtual locations; for the latter, a specific place ("Chmielna Street") inspires games of "social engineering." I've been talking about games a lot these days, especially in conjunction with the word "location." I suppose the point of this little compare-and-contrast exercise for me is to remind myself how variable our definitions of "location-based" anything can - and should - be.

[Also: I just heard about Pacmanhattan, a running game of PacMan played on the gridded streets of New York. Yes, it's an ITP project - from Frank Lantz' game design class.]

Amazon has a new spin-off, A9, that would seem to be in competition with Google, yet strangely "enhances" their searches with licensed Google technology.

Much of what they're doing is just moving record-keeping functions such as bookmarking and surfing histories to a web service from the desktop. I am, however, kind of interested in this:

Diary: This is the newest and (we think) coolest feature of the toolbar. You can take notes on any web page, and reference them whenever you visit that page, on any computer that you use. Your entries are automatically saved whenever you stop typing or when you go to another page

Unfortunately, we Mac users will just have to wait for a version we can use.

So Clay just wrote an essay based in part on a class of his I took called "Social Weather."

I'm very cheered, mostly because I hope that this means fewer people (you know who you are) will ask me in the future to explain what exactly I did to get a master's in "interactive telecommunications."

Even though Clay doesn't use this phrase as such, he's pointing towards a phenomenon I hadn't really thought as such before: software as gifting. That is, as the costs in time and money of setting up simple interactive applications drop, it becomes practical and possible to give them away as a way to affirm and establish close relationships. I'm thinking of the revolution in personal publishing made possible by cheap printing/copying, when suddenly families began to send "holiday newsletters" in bulk to friends and relatives.* One example these days is hosting and blog setup -- an easy and quick favor from a web-literate person to a less technical friend. Or a quick promo website done as a Christmas present.

I don't think that these minor favors will replace design-for-hire. But both of those represent a significant departure from the way online gifting (ie, sending a premade e-card or forwarding lists of dumb jokes) has been happening.

*I will ignore for the moment the question of whether this was actually a good thing.

Bent 2004 (this week, Spaceworks in NYC) is a festival of music produced by "circuit bending" devices like Gameboys and cellphones into musical instruments.

Reed Ghazala, who has been dubbed the "father of circuit bending," got his start when a small battery-powered amplifier shorted out amid the junk in his desk drawer.

"It was 1966 or '67," he said. "I was 14 or 15 years old, a penniless Midwestern hippie kid who'd heard synths on recordings but could never afford one. But this little shorted-out 9-volt amp is sitting there making synth sounds all by itself! Immediately I thought -- if this can happen by accident, what can happen by purpose? And if this can happen to an amplifier, a circuit not supposed to make a sound on its own, what would happen if you did the same thing to keyboards, radios and all the other stuff that already makes a sound of some kind?"

Ghazala said what he had discovered that night was his introduction to an entirely new world of music.

"Circuit-bent instruments are alien instruments," Ghazala said. "We are actually listening to an alien music here! Bent instruments, and their music, are not of human planning. We send probes into deep space for this kind of thing -- to listen to alien worlds. But alien worlds aren't always that far away."

I've never heard the phrase "circuit bending" before, and I like it. "Bending" suggests a very different attitude towards appropriation and re-use then, say, "hacking."

Wired via Milena

From a random person on deli.cio.us comes a new way to waste hours and hours � and it�s musical: Audioscrobbler. Audioscrobbler is a music player plugin that coordinates with a central website to transmit and track your listening preferences, then connect you with other music you might also like. No music is exchanged � it�s just about metadata. Users can club together into groups and aggregate all their playlists. There�s also a forum function so that scrobblers can comment on any song, artist, and other scrobbler they like. Audioscrobbler very consciously draws on the Amazon principles � but what they don�t say is that they�ve also learned the lessons of various YASNS.

They're also using the metaphor of the neighborhood, which I like -- I'm assuming it's borrowed from blogstreet. Your neighborhood is your favourite artists, friends, and people with similar music taste to you. It only really gets interesting with the Neighborhood Gossip option: Show me similar gossip that may be interesting to this user' (Though I haven�t gotten this feature to work yet.)

The social causes and effects of automatically publishing playlists on a website for strangers to view is especially interesting because it�s inherently tied to real-world decisions, albeit on a micro level. Every single track listed in my profile is there because at some point I pressed "play." Unlike, say, Friendster, where there�s no way to know whether I�ve actually read all the books I claim as favorites, there�s no faking it with Audioscrobbler. Thus, the requirements for joining groups actually have some numerical weight:

Membership requirements: 200 songs scrobbled, at least 8 of your top 20 scrobbled artists must have been part of the 80's rock/metal scene.

More than 5 grunge or nu-metal bands anywhere in your top list will disqualify you from this group by default for having poor taste. :-P This group is for true fans of 80's rock only.*

I�m slowly getting addicted to watching my profile update itself. Tonight I decided that I need to do some image-maintenance so that I look a little less 1994-indie-centric than I really am. Obviously, we can all think of ten ways to game this system before breakfast. But that�s the point: even by trying to game it, you�ve already bought into its comprehensibility and its values.

Audioscrobbler works so well because it never prompts me to enter track names or artists. Instead, it draws its (relatively harmless)** data dynamically from everyday activities. Combine it with I Love Music, the best music-based community (and I use that word very advisedly) ever, and I would be hooked forever.

*This group only has one member, natch.
** Or is it harmless to know for sure that Anil Dash wen through a big Prince phase? In the interests of fairness, I will admit that my own musical tastes are fairly indefensible.

So I've been kind of overwhelmingly busy lately, but I took a break last week to go see the exceedingly clever Erik Sandelin and Magnus Torstensson talk about their Digital Peacock project at ITP. In their words, they critically use "issues of naivete and trust" to explore surveillance and increased dependence on technology.

Some key phrases:

"de-search and re-velopment"

"de-cycling"

"sartorial submission"

"dressed for dependence"

I especially liked their Power Pilgrims project, in which the creators wander around dressed only in robes held together with electromagnets, begging power from anyone with a wall outlet.

Using the umbilical power cord the pilgrim recharges the battery from a normal wall socket. Without power the electro-magnets cease to function and the robe fall to the ground in pieces, leaving the pilgrim naked, ashamed and repentant.

I'm also a big fan of the social experiments their students have done:

One student wrote all their personal numeric data (credit card numbers, etc) on a sweatshirt, then tried to get through a normal day by reading the numbers of the sweater -- or having strangers do it for her.

Two other studentsmade a custom apron with mobile-phone-sized pockets.She then stood in the lobby of a bank with a no-phones policy and offered to babysit entering customers' phones by putting them in her apron until they concluded their business. She also offered to answer the phones for them, and take a message if required. Amazingly, quite a few people took her up on the offer.

They aim to operate with "fresh eyes and dirty hands." Yes.

Did you ever wish you could hide your location when talking on the phone? Ever wanted to give the impression you were somewhere else?

SounderCover gives you the ability to add a background sound to any incoming or outgoing call, giving the impression that you really are in the environment where the background sound is normally heard.

My favorite background noises are "dentist," and "circusparade." For only 14.95 Euros, a bargain. No, a steal.

a dupliance, unlike an appliance, is a device that serves two purposes. but these two purposes can't just be any purposes of which you can think. rather, for a device to be a dupliance it must be designed to encompass an information-related activity as well as it should support a particular physical activity. Daniel Fallman

Does singing in the rain count?

In wizardry, a familiar is an attendant spirits that serve its master, usually a wizard, sorcerer, or other magical being. Familiars were mentioned in Shakespeare's Macbeth, as the witches called their familiars...The most common species identified as familiars are cats (particularly black cats), owls, and sometimes frogs or toads. from Wikipedia

In the days when I thought I would live and die in my cubicle (RIP Elizabeth Goodman, 1976 - 1999: She never letterspaced her lowercase), I used to while away the late afternoons before the coffee kicked in by imagining my own pseudo-Disney musicals. The heroine was a hapless - but determined - paper pusher victimized by her cruel boss (based closely on the wicked stepmother from Snow White). Struggling mightily to get through massive dance numbers yet still produce final mechs on time, the heroine (in no way based on me) had only one ally to depend upon: her mouse.

A childhood spent at the movies had taught me the necessity of a sidekick. All great Disney heroines worth their salt had a cute, wisecracking anthropormorphized friend -- whether it be a meerkat, or a mouse, or even a dancing teacup. So why not a computer peripheral?

I suppose if I were to do it all over again, I'd give the heroine a cellphone that talked back.

A few days ago, by the way, was the the 312nd anniversary of the Salem witch trials. I spent the first part of my childhood in Massachusetts, and the Puritans have always felt very close. Four centuries ago, 25 people were condemned to death after young girls began to speak to beings that others could not see. It occurred to me last night that the Disney animal friend is, weirdly, a distant echo of the witch's familiar. Turned inside out and upside down, Cinderella's mice are the witch's cat. The former leads to the fairy godmother and a royal marriage, and the latter leads (in the eyes of the Puritans) straight to hell in Lucifer's Caddy. And remembering my old Disney parodies, I began to think about the cell phone as not just a cultural echo of the Disney sidekick, but also as a kind of familiar.

Bear with me here.

My phone makes noises only I can hear. It brings me messages from faraway places and shows me things I could never see on my own. It helps me do things I could never do on my own -- like find a dress for a dance or talk to invisible spirits in the air. I take my phone everywhere, and keep it close to my body at all times. Nevertheless, it depends upon me and I must feed it constantly.

China Mieville has this great story, which I cannot locate online, about a man and his familiar. I haven't read the story for about a year, but it concerns what happens when a man creates an external extension of himself, then tries to rid himself of it. The ending is not very pleasant.

There's something very soothing about having my cell phone around, so soothing that I can almost forget how anxious I feel when it's not there. I've become so used to the way it extends my presence in the world, used to walking down the street with cell signal, my invisible umbilical cord, extending far out to the other cell phones my cell phone calls friends.

A witch was supposed to feed her familiar spirit with her own blood, which the animal sucked from her body at a special nipple that became known as a witch's mark. http://www.supernaturalworld.com/familiar.html

The first part of my childhood I spent in Massachusetts, as I said. But I spent the other half in Los Angeles. I recognize a Magic Kingdom when I see it.

Update: Hi, everyone. Because for some reason this entry gets massive spam, and I need to get the admin of this (school-based) server to install the anti-spam plugin for me, I'm disabling comments here. Don't everyone complain all at once.

So my head has been in the land of large stationary LCD screens for a while (meet my new best friends) and not in the land of small mobile devices. But I had a helpful conversation with the mighty Mer, scourge of careless thereminists and mean people, so I have made a bit of time to finally answer Matt�s question from Etech.

Addendum: I fixed all the links now. Sorry about that.

Part I: Portholes and lighthouses

It�s important to note that I�m not really a gadget person. I�m sure there�s all sorts of lovely and exciting stuff out there that I just don�t know about. However, now that I am extremely mobile myself (no landline, no ISP, no permanent address) I�m beginning to get more and more interested.

The problem is that I want my cell phone to be both a porthole and a lighthouse. I want it to show me what�s going on elsewhere in my little social world (a la Upoc) and I want to reveal more of my world to my friends. Location data, photos, sounds � whatever. Thus far, my mobile phone has been a terrible disappointment on both counts.

Part II: There�s no time (and place) like the present

It�s clear that mobile interfaces are going to have to deal better with context � geographic and social. I'm thinking here of Scott's and the Bell Labs systems' attempts to deal with mobility, location-sensing, and privacy preferences. And I�m also thinking of all the ubicomp work on trying to determine �social context� and have devices that automatically respond. [The IDEO Social Mobiles take a different tack by attempting to modify user behavior.

The problem with preferences, as Scott says, is that establishing them ahead of time doesn�t really help manage the unexpected � and we encounter the unexpected everyday. So you�ve got to have a mobile UI to manage who knows where you are, when. And it needs to take into account the fuzziness of all those concepts. The �are you my friend?� question is getting ever more unhelpful, as is the �are you a friend of my friend?� question. And the thinking of �location� as some sort of unified, uncomplicated set of numbers that we can all just integrate into existing interfaces is also pretty unhelpful too. As Chris Heathcote remindsme, �location� means something different when you�re driving than when you�re walking. It�s different at 1am and 1pm. It�s different when you know where you are and when you�re lost.

That�s a lot of difference to pack into a tiny screen. I�m thinking here of what Pet Shop Boys told us back in the �80s:

Too many shadows, whispering voices
Faces on posters, too many choices
If, when, why, what?
How much have you got?
Have you got it, do you get it, if so, how often?
And which do you choose, a hard or soft option?
(How much do you need?)

Part III: Soft options

It�s funny how �preferences� in UI-speak mean the exact opposite of general usage. Often, �preferences� are a code word for maturity. I prefer cream in my coffee � but I don�t need it. I�ll take the powdered stuff if necessary. Preferences are why adults don�t raise bloody hell over dairy-free coffee at 8am. People with preferences, as opposed to people with needs, have a little built-in wiggle room. They are tolerant of failure.

Preferences in UIs, whether mobile or otherwise, tend towards the imperious and the absolute (it�s like they�re small children or celebrities). [This is, I think, a discussion similar to Molly�s thinking on vagueness.] My cell phone doesn�t have preferences in any way I understand the phrase. It has dictates. I wish there was an input field for commands like: �I�d actually rather not get calls right now, but if the message seems very urgent you might keep bugging me until I pick up" - but that�s a bit much to expect. However, it's reasonable at some point soon to expect the phone to cope a little bit better with social ambiguities.

Sketching on a touch screen (including pressure and speed variables) is one way to introduce that kind of softness. I could doodle on a map of NYC to register interest in events in specific neighborhoods. Or I could draw �blackout zones� where the ringer is never on. Drawing could also introduce some social distinctions in my address book by letting me create, edit, and link groups more quickly.

Time-based media and semi-transparent overlays might also help add some flexibility to the mix. I�m just wildly speculating here, but maybe managing my social/geographic visibility by using transparency as a UI widget might be helpful. I�m recalling a very interesting paper I saw last year from James Hudson and Alan Parkes at Lancaster University on combining �context dependent gestures, animated periphicons and transparent overlays� to save on screen real estate.

Part of why I keep the clamshell � despite its evident flaws � is the satisfying snap when I close it. With my last phone, I�d periodically forget to lock the keys and would suffer inevitable embarrassment when it dialed friends, ex-friends, and casual acquaintances. I like the snap � so why not use more tactile interactions? Why not a squishy phone I can squeeze to shut up, or a phone that responds to gesture and deletes a txt when I shake it.

More and more, I don�t want to fiddle with my phone to get a message. I'm not so convinced I want an always-on, push-to-talk, radio-style communicator. But it would be nice if the little screen on the front of my clamshell acted like an always-open porthole, providing a limited, fleeting glimpse of a larger sea of social communications. I may not always have the time to read messages or participate, but its nice to hear my friends as a low murmur of conversation underlying the main activities of my day. Because that�s what I did with shells when I was a little girl. I put them to my ear and listened for the ocean.

Lili Cheng and Sean Kelly
MSR

Social computing

[as usual, anything in brackets is all me]

Fiona Romeo

So lo these many weeks ago, I found a super-cool site, downloaded a jpg to blog, and then promptly got distracted, forgot about it, and couldn't find my way back a few weeks later when I remembered again. Luckily, BoingBoing takes care of such things for me, because the guestblogger is one of the people responsible for the genius illustration above: Project Mendel:

Logos taken from companies listed in the Fortune 500 were mixed strictly after Mendel�s theory of heredity, using characteristics such as colour, type face, type size, type style, et cetera. The decision about who is the dominant partner was of course determined by capital.

I met these really nice undergrads who had somehow convinced O'Reilly to give them free press passes to the conference in the name of an undergrad weekly newspaper -- which is akin to me getting a free pass by telling O'Reilly I'm going to write it up for my blog. I respect ingenuity in the face of relative poverty and exclusion, especially from people under drinking age.

Anyway, they had very long faces after the Microsoft Research presentation on Wallop, and came over (I think) to get some sympathy. Basically, they felt as if MSR had taken its 500 lb gorilla self and sat on all their cool ideas. And because it's Microsofty, Wallop is bigger, glossier, more function-packed and infinitely more robust than anything two undergrads could put together in a semester. It synthesizes a lot of thinking about PC-based group communication into one overwhelming package.

I sympathized. I did. It always sucks when you learn that your brilliant idea has already been had, articulated, developed, and publicized by older and better funded people. Oh, and it also sucks when they're getting paid to work on it 8+ hours a day and you're paying tuition.

But so what if they feel that Wallop has blocked an entire avenue of creative development? So what if they feel that a lot of their own thinking and insight has been steamrollered by a monster truck that they're not even allowed to drive? Knowing what you're NOT going to do can sometimes produce more knowledge than knowing exactly where you're going.

What I tried to tell the undergrads, in my own confused and ham-handed way, is that their job is not to compete with the MSRs of the world. Their job is to find the interesting ideas that MSR can't imagine (being more established can be a barrier to certain kinds of innovation, Shawn Fanning being a case in point), then run with them. MSR is doing Wallop - they should go off and do something else more exciting.

I'm not sure if they believed me. I'm glad I'm not an undergrad anymore.

Via SmartMobs, I just learned of the work of Usman Haque and have been thinking a lot about SkyEar.

This non-rigid "cloud", made up of several hundred glowing helium balloons will be embedded with mobile phones. The balloons will contain miniature sensor circuits (simple gaussmeters) that detect levels of electromagnetic radiation at a variety of frequencies. When activated, the sensor circuits will cause ultra-bright coloured LEDs to illuminate. The cloud will glow and flicker brightly as it passes through varying radio and microwave spaces.

As visitors to the event call into the cloud to listen to the distant electromagnetic sounds of the sky (including whistlers and spherics), their mobile phone calls will change the local hertzian topography; these disturbances in the electromagnetic fields inside the cloud will alter the glow intensity of that part of the balloon cloud. Feedback within the sensor network will create ripples of light reminiscent of rumbling thunder and flashes of lightning.

I also read Sky Ear (although Haque probably does not intend this reading) as an echo of the extent to which features of the �natural� landscape have disappeared into human-built structures. The lights from the Los Angeles skyline turn the night sky lavender; the lights from oil drilling platforms out at sea look a bit like low-hanging stars.

The interaction concept is very apt, very clear, very elegant. The clouds of elecromagnetic washing the earth become visible, human intervention imagined as flashes of lightning. But somehow I�m not convinced. I want some things to remain invisible, unless there�s real need. In this case, the sky is enough for me. I�ve beent rying to figure out why I responded so negatively, but somehow the physicality of the cloud disturbs me. It�s a beautiful idea, but the plastic bubbles in the air seem like pollution: plastic bags washed into gutters that strangle sea animals; city lights that occlude the stars; smog that chokes the Valley. Extra elements that cloak not clarify. There�s a glut of visual information in the air now: billboards, signs on skyscrapers, plane winglights. Even in interaction there�s an (understandable) obsession with visibility at the expense of other senses. Even if the lights are pretty and interactive and meaningful, they�re still one extra ingredient in an already crowded sky. I�d prefer a Sky Ear above my head that listens, but doesn�t talk back.

I�m more excited about Haque�s project Haunt, which uses humidity, temperatures and electromagnetic and sonic frequencies that parapsychologists have associated with haunted spaces...[to build] an environment that feels "haunted."

The first time I saw the RemoteHome project, I missed the most salient point:

The RemoteHome is a flat share that will exist in two distant cities at the same time: London and Berlin. Both spaces are electronically connected through the Internet, to turn furniture and architectural elements into tangible and sensual means of communication. Sensory and kinetic devices, as well as an interactive light installation allow for the exchange between this remotely living group of friends. A mobile wireless artefact, in the shape of a transforming interactive bag, can be taken on journeys to stay emotionally in touch with the RemoteHome. [emph. mine]

...it's all about sharing life in groups over distance. Unless I misunderstood and the apartments are single-occupancy, this project is one of the first attempts at technology-enhanced domestic spaces I've seen that responds to the conditions of unmarried life in urban centers. Roommates, longterm friendships, delayed marriage/childbirth -- it suddenly hits me that there's been little telepresence work involving the kind of sustained group relationships Ethan Watters described in Urban Tribes.

Now, it could be that there's little work because this just not a good idea, like the doomed voyeurism of We Live in Public. But I wonder if it isn't just that, at least in America, there hasn't been a lot of attention to paid domestic spaces that don't conform to the three- bedroom-and-two-car-garage model, or the gadget-filled Maxim-al flat.

I don't know if I would want to live with my friends in New York, even though I miss them terribly. Part of friendship is the careful maintenance of distance, after all. But I'm touched that the aether design group are trying to support the friendships of people like me -- or even people like themselves.

The Safe Room: NBC Protection Tent " The NBC Protection Tent is an innovative fusion of a hi-tech NBC (Nuclear, Biological and Chemical) filtering system with a low-tech inflatable structure. The tent provides a reusable habitat where people can hang out during an NBC crisis. The tent also doubles in times of peace as a home-office cubical with excellent acoustics.

Kanae passed along this Japanese-American online store from Compact-Impact.

If anyone wants to buy me the SafeRoom, I wouldn't say no. Forget RFIDs and bracelet communicators. Inflatables, man. Inflatables are the future.

I somehow missed, back in November, Time magazine's hoopla over the Frog Design/Motorola iDEN Offspring prototypes for wearable, wireless networked objects that (huzzah!) aren't watches, cellphones, or PDAs. Not that I don't like watches, cellphones, and PDAs. But there's a fine line between, say, enhancing existing objects with appropriate connectivity -- and being afraid to produce anything new.

I always like dynamic color schemes, especially those that change in response to physical environmental variables or user behaviors. Douwe Osinga is doing some nice work thinking about group behaviors to affect the appearance of websites, including Automatic Color Scheme:

The website has its colorscheme centrally stored and it all depends on two variables, the hue of the site and the saturation. The hue is the basic color as taken from the rainbow. The saturation is how full this color is, i.e. how far removed from gray...Now, when a visitor lands on any page, he will get a saturation/hue pair similar to the current one. The longer he stays, the more the current one will be modified in the direction of that particular variation.

I also like his Mapped Web visualizations:

Physical distances are easy enough to measure, but how do we go about measuring psychological distances?�The Mapped Web�does this by taking the chance that given a page contains the name of one country it will also contain the name of another country as a measure for psychological distance. The resulting images show us how close countries are to each other in psychological terms.

Douwe also has downloadable code for everything I looked at, which I think is really commendable.

Douglas' favorite songs and albums of the year. The usual combination of the obscure sublime and the undeniable crowd. If that can be called usual.

From Eric, David Keady's thesis, which looks at...

interesting ways that technology (GPS in particular) can either add
layers of information to the physical space or conversely expose information about the ways we move and interact. One project looks at the ways that group dynamics could be quantified and in what ways can that information be used in an interesting way. Another looks at the way we interact with people and how their aura can be passed on digitally.

Keady's site has a lot of project ideas, some of them familiar, some of them new. It's always nice to an emphasis on visualization and narrative even in project proposals.

From a poster on tribe.net, of all places, I learn that a new THB has been out since October. THB, for those of you who do not follow the career of Mr. Paul Pope, is "a kind of Arabic western set on Mars." Yeah.

Okay. So at some point in this morning's blog-reading bonanza, someone linked to James Grimmelmann's fantastic piece on the State of Play conference, and the Second Life decision to give its players IP control over what they've created for the game. James took some time on this article, and it's a very, very clear explanation of the thorny issues involving real life law, game regulations, and creative work. Oh yes, and he makes the important point that one of the primary value of games for players is that...give it time...they're fun. And that a lot of intellectual questions about the value of EULAs and game administration need to come from that.

We've seen three critically important "legal" issues that arise in connection with online multiplayer games and other virtual worlds:

* Who owns (or should own) intellectual property created in virtual worlds?
* Who has (or should have) power over in-game property in virtual worlds?
* When will (or should) real-life law intervene in virtual worlds?

Then go read my other favorite post by James, which is about privacy spills.

Since I namecheck LawMeme, you'd think I read it frequently enough to catch this stuff without being reminded to go look at it.

[Addendum. It's via many2many. Thanks, Clay.]

The Wear Me catalogue for IEE Eurowearable '03 has a few great projects to remember, including a raincoat project from Elise Co of MIT.

Puddlejumper is a raincoat that glows when water hits conductive sensors on the back and left sleeve. A little bit like the raincoat I wanted a few days ago... The LazyWeb...working overtime and retroactively.

From the makers of Teddy Ruxpin... "Wabi Bear"!

Innovative wireless technology allows you to phone from anywhere in the world to send your child messages in your own voice. When Wabi giggles, your child pushes a lighted button to hear the message.

So the idea is that you call in a message and the teddy bear plays it back, along with a selection of songs and stories.

Wabi Bears have big manga eyes and chipper smiles...I don't know whether the multiple voices of parents and family members emerging from that cheery stuffed mouth will be comforting or creepily schizophrenic. Since the Wabi Bear has no personality of its own, it functions as the polar opposite of the traditional teddy bear, whom the child endows with its own imagined personality, name, and history. Instead, the Wabi Bear is a transmitter for whomever has its number. It's like Deleuze plus Disney plus anime.

In other news, there's now a cell phone with a tilt interface. When it comes to mobile technology and disembodiment, you win some and you lose some, you know?

Just checked out the info on Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project currently at the Tate Modern. The transformation of the Tate looks magical:

The Tate has also neatly merchandized the installation by including a list of weather-related products by Eliasson, including:

this umbrella which, when with rain, reveals a line of text written by Eliasson. It's a lovely idea, actually - I'd like one for myself but don't want to think about the shipping charges from the UK. I think there's a lot of interesting work right now on clothing that reacts to environmental variables (pollution being the most common factor), but Eliasson's umbrella idea is so simple and so elegant I couldn't help imagining, say, a raincoat that would do the same. So far, I've found this one, by Prada

that starts out transparent and becomes opaque when wet. Via Wired.

INSIDE/OUTSIDE is a represents air pollution levels on a handbag; Fashion Victims represents EMF radiation levels on a variety of clothing, including t-shirts and hats. Both use embedded circuitry to sense environmental variables and translate changing conditions into a visual display. On the other hand, the raincoat I'm imagining (which, I suppose, if I had the ca$h money I could buy) is both sensor and actuator. It's a rainy day in Portland and looking out the window, I can't help but want a blue raincoat that is dappled hot pink with rain.

Just heard about a NYU conference (Nov 13-15) on "The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds" that looks faaaaascinating. It's drawing speakers from both the game design side, the social sciences side, and the legal side. I'm especially interested in the legal side, given that it's a perspective that is often notably absent from discussions of emerging technologies. Given that gap, this entry is a reminder to myself to try to check up more regularly on LawMeme, a generally helpful and interesting Yale Law blog on issues of digital media. This week's vocab word: "copynorms". Thanks, LawMeme (and Wikipedia)!

Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

So I was looking at this and decided to check out the GeoUrl link and discovered this stunning site. Now I really want to visit Koln. Which I guess is the point, no?