Personal blogs work best!

If you scroll down a bit, you will see Tim’s post on this blog : “Should this be public?”
As we are aware, there are many issues around making a blog public, but equally many problems with a private blog, if it cannot generate debate and discussion as intended.

I have decided to continue writing about design innovation, new methods in design research, and interesting interaction design stuff, but on a different blog, which will be public. Because, as Richard pointed out, it will be easier to maintain, and will not infringe on any privacy issues, on the contrary it will be a space for commentary, reflection and play! I will send the link as soon as its up and running…

And as blogging goes, I have just done a guest post for a service design company in the Netherlands, called ‘Inspiring service design from ‘old India’

Design and the Elastic Mind

I went to the opening of this fantastic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Gubbins and the RFID project that Alex and I are working on, have been featured in the catalogue and the website of this show. Here’s the link to the official website, but be warned, it is not the easiest site to navigate:

Here I have pulled out a couple of links from the rapid (and even slow) prototyping section:

1. ‘Rules of Six’ by architects Aranda/Lasch: Specially commissioned for this exhibition, using Rhino3D, high-density foam and a live algorithm, this piece is an experimentation which explories self-assembly and modularity across scales. Here’s a link to their work.

2. The ‘Honeycomb Vase’ by Tomas Gabzdil Libertiny is literally made by bees. Libertiny constructed the piece by making a vase-shaped beehive scaffold which was removed after one week, and the efforts of approximately 40,000 bees. The designer coined the term ’slow prototyping’ as an ironic counterpoint to today’s rapid prototyping technology.

3. Sketch Furniture from Front Design: This is one of the most popular projects, the conceptual ‘Sketch Furniture‘ project from Sweden’s Front Design which was drawing a lot of attention. The sketch furniture in the ‘air’ (lieterally), which is captured by a motion capture software, and sent to a rapid prototyping machine for printing.

Should this be public?

In our recent discussions about blogging there was a sense, though far from unanimous, that it would be useful to have a group blog to open up the kind of discussions we have face-to-face and over email and the interesting links we pass around. Anab’s started this blog as part of that process.

But I find myself frustrated that we are thinking of this as an internal only blog. Let me give you an example. I recently added a post to this blog about visualizations of the Bible. I’d like to do two things with that:

1. Reference the post publicly as part of my developing ideas on book visualizations, and as a homage to the projects I mentioned in the post.
2. Put track-backs in the blog entries that alerted me to the projects I cited.

But because it is a private blog I cannot draw public attention to it. And yet, because it isn’t password protected, or hosted inside corpnet, it isn’t genuinely private so I cannot post ‘team only’ stuff either. For example at our recent “Bring a Gadget” Monday team meeting Dave Kirk showed an excellent white board tool he’s developed. There was some talk of patenting it and while I doubt that will happen, I still feel I cannot discuss the idea in a blog post that isn’t restricted to our team by some security mechanism.

But maybe no one cares. Please do leave a comment if you agree or disagree that this should be a blog we can reference publicly.

Bible Visualizations

A while ago Anab posted about the Institute for the Future of the Book, which lead to a discussion of information visualizations of book texts. One book that receives repeated attention is The Bible. This interest stems in part from the religious nature of the book itself (i.e. believers and academics are keen to gain new perspectives and new study aides), and in part from the ready availability of multiple versions of the text (e.g. through The Online Parallel Bible Project or The Bible Gateway). Over the years I’ve come across a number of inspiring abstract visualizations of the Bible, for example:

Anh Dang’s “Gospel Spectum”

Kushal Dave’s “exegesis”

Linda Becker’s ‘In Translation’

Philipp Steinweber and Andreas Koller’s “Similar Diversity”

Recently two more have popped up on Andrew Vande Moere’s information aesthetics blog.

The first is old and not computer based. It’s Clarence Larkin’s “Dispensational Charts”. Done over 75 years ago they map out various concepts by visually plotting the relevant biblical passages. E.g.:

Clarence Larkin’s “Dispensational Charts”

The second gives rise to the picture heading this post. It’s Chris Harrison’s “Visualizing The Bible”. Chris starts with an arc diagram plotting cross-references through the bible and then adds some network graphs of the people and places in the bible.

Chris Harrison’s “Visualizing The Bible”

Although Chris develops a visual aesthetic reminiscent of much of the work done with Processing he is in fact just using the Java 2D libraries.

Tactile Text Messaging

Vodafone’s digital magazine Receiver has a lovely article by Matt Locke, Director of Creative Research & Development for BBC New Media and Technology titled Light touches - text messaging, intimacy and photography.

An excerpt:

“…Text messages also carry a tactile quality. Like the photograph, the text message is a kind of pointing, saying ‘I am here’ or ‘look at this’. Texting is also an accumulation of light touches – presses on a keypad rather than the click of a camera shutter. Even more, text messages often arrive with a tactile sensation, a vibration that acts like a tap on the shoulder…”

“… Text messages carry their tactile experience with them. They are the product of touching, announce themselves with touches, are revealed by touches and erased with a further touch. We no longer carry photographs in lockets, trapped in jewellery worn next to the skin, but remember those close to us through their words, transmitted in 160 characters or less from their hand to ours…”

The Flying Saucer Hotel!

This is not directly connected to technologies in the home, but is certainly quite cool. French designer Jean-Marie Massaud has proposed a flying hotel called ‘Manned Cloud’  which is a whale-shaped airship, developed with French national aerospace research body ONERA, and will be able to accommodate 40 guests and have a range of 5,000 km.  Manned Cloud will have a cruising speed of 130 km/h and a top speed of 170 km/h. Two two-deck cabin will contain amenities including a restaurant, a library, a fitness suite and a spa. There will also be a sun deck on top of the double helium-filled envelopes.

As the designer says: “Living in the sky, watching the Earth from above. Rediscovering the marvel of traveling, experiencing contemplation. Exploring the world without trace…”

The Risk of Innovation?

New York Times recently had an article titled: The Risk of Innovation: Will Anyone Embrace it? where G. Pascal Zachary briefly discusses how and why some innovations are embraced over others. Some excerpts:

“…Even today, when adding video to a phone is a trivial cost, consumers may rebel. Video- conferencing often remains an activity forced on people by their employers. Resistance to technology is an omnipresent risk for every innovator. Even a device as fabulously freeing as the personal computer struck some people as an abomination…”

“…FOR technological innovators, the cash register can ring either way. They may achieve a smash-hit breakthrough, or simply make a slight improvement in a technology that humans already feel comfortable with. Most innovators no longer even try to predict human reactions to their creations. Henry Kressel, a partner at Warburg Pincus and a co-author of “Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations Are Changing the World,” says, “You throw technologies into the market and see what sticks.” The hope is that passionate “early adopters” will blaze a path toward mass acceptance of a new technology. Yet the truth is that no one can tell in advance which innovations people will adapt to and which will become the next example of the Picturephone.”

Modular Gadgets from Bug Labs

American technology company Bug Labs has developed a system where consumers combine modular electronic devices to build their own ideal gadget. Called BUG, the system consists of a BUGbase with four connectors so that different elements can simply be snapped onto the sides. It was unveiled at the International CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas earlier this month. Four modules will be available to start with: GPS, digital camera and videocam, touch-sensitive colour LCD screen, and accelerometer and motion sensor. Other modules will be added later this year, including a teleporter apparently!

Design for the Mobile Phone revolution

A nice article on the BBC about how mobile phones can transform the developing world.

(The story is written by Dr. Joel Selanikio, a physician and co-founder of DataDyne.org, a non-profit creating open-source software for public health and international development, including the EpiSurveyor mobile public health data collection toolkit.)

Domestic Futures: ‘The Archigram Effect’

The email dialogue between Richard Banks and Bill Buxton last week once again brought home the message: Using techniques of sketching and storytelling to explore scenarios of the future are of utmost importance, and when initial sketches become too “real” and rendered” they can often look tacky and not well thought through. If the design sketch in question is able to provoke a response, suspend disbelief and enable people to explore a certain future, then it is a technique well worth pursuing.

In this context I thought it might be worth mentioning a position paper I recently wrote titled: “Domestic Futures: The Archigram Effect” for a workshop about exploring the future of domestic interior through sketching, at Aarhus by Marianne Graves.

I referred to the radical architecture group of the 60s ‘Archigram’ as a source of inspiration for the workshop, because their radical and futuristic thinking, optimistic view of technology combined with their style of communication through sketching, may prove inspiring. Although few of the buildings conceived by Archigram were ever built, their sketches, collages and writing continue to inspire architects around the world - the Pompidou Centre in Paris being one of the most obvious examples. It was in 1964 that Ron Herron conceived the idea of a ‘walking city’ – a city constituted by intelligent buildings or robots that are in the form of giant, self contained living pods that could roam the cities.

Ofcourse many designers now use such techniques in their work, but in many ways Archigram were the pioneers. But the question is, why refer to the Archigram story, especially when none of those radical futuristic scenarios ever became real? Because it is a piecemeal adoption of technology that we are seeing today, not an instant sci-fi world of crazy walking cities…

To counter argue, I think the danger in not thinking of extreme visions may be that we become perhaps slightly complacent – intellectually and creatively.
More importantly, this may prevent us from getting inspired to create tangible outcomes of new technologies for today, which are thought provoking and playful at the same time. Are we shying away from radical visions of the future because of they exist outside the scope of our imaginations, or is it perhaps a worthless and indulgent exercise to draw up extreme scenarios? Could such scenarios instead – become a source of inspiration? Can this method of creating imaginative, yet possible superfictions enable us to be more articulate in forming visionary scenarios about how we may want to live in the home?

These are questions that we all address in our work in different ways, but for me, the visual style of Archigram which included drawing, sketching, illustrating, photo collages is highly relevant. I am still exploring this space…

(more info about the ‘Archigram Effect’ here.)