Textura Design Blog

Bike Hugger in the New York Times

2010-03-10T20:17:54Z

Worth nothing for the first-time ever, the NY Times quoted me and I didn’t sound stupid.

“We think this is fantastic,” said D.L. Byron, publisher of BikeHugger.com, a blog about bike culture based in Seattle. “It will open up reliable transportation options to cyclists.” Mr. Byron said that while plenty of programs allow cyclists to upload their routes to the Web, no other service provides optimal directions for cyclists in urban settings, at least not on a national scale.

Mr. Byron predicted that the Google service would help to promote cycling as an alternative mode of transportation. “A lot of people would love to get on their bike but are afraid they won’t find a safe route,” he said. “If you make these options more available to people, they will do it.”

The article is about Google Bike Maps, a topic we’re blogging at Bike Hugger. Google is joining us for the Mobile Social SXSW, an urban ride meetup we do annually @sxsw.

Speaking Season 2010

2010-03-06T01:38:25Z

As I tweeted earlier this week,

Speaking at @140tc @MIXEvent @sxsw and @cascadebicycle Bike Expo in the span of a week.

then I noticed

Man in a Suitcase shuffles in on iTunes right as I’m wondering what idiot scheduled 4 speaking gigs in one week!

Oh wait that was me. Yep, here we go with the speaking:

The Twitter talk covers the tools
Modertating a bike culture panel at the Bike Expo
SXSW is about Changing the World with Bikes
Mix 10 is about Designing the Ordinary

Secretary Clinton Meets With Argentine President on Twitter

2010-03-02T00:16:49Z

Never imagined I’d see Secretary Clinton live tweeted when I was working for the Department of Energy at the Hanford complex in the 90s. Back then we were trying to figure out how to paginate Environmental Impact Statements in HTML and arguing about standardizing on Netscape Enterprise Server or sticking with APACHE.

Remarkable progress when you see it like that.

Uploaded by U.S. Department of State | more from the dreeping set on Flickr.

Winter Olympics: Contrasts

2010-02-16T16:34:54Z

There is splendor, energy, a new sense of pride in Canada for the Winter Olympics, and also contrasts like this photo

Suburban white youth billboard above a barbed-wire abandoned lot on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, just a few blocks away from the Olympic Torch.

The photo was shot in the Downtown Eastside neighborhood where, to put it bluntly, the drug addicts and sex workers are. That’s also a few blocks away from where a community effort to give everyone a voice at the Olympics is being undertaken by the W2 Community Media Arts House. They’re “making history as the first and likely last independent social media centre during an Olympics.”

W2 provides media labs, guidance, pirate television, and a welcoming approach to those interested more in the affect of the Games then the medals. Because what you won’t see on TV is the Cultural Olympiad. Vancouver is a city invigorated to tell its stories through the arts and media and W2 is in the middle of it.

Bike Hugger, a blog I publish, was accredited at the BCMC. That’s another center serving media that hasn’t paid the Olympics broadcast rights. Similar function to the W2 house, but under the official umbrella of the IOC with rules on what you can blog and not: don’t disparage the Olympics, keep it upbeat, not sports reporting at all. No such rules at W2.

Socializing the Good

This weekend I’m traveling to Amsterdam to talk at FITC a creative conference, and I’ll add a slide about what’s going on in Vancouver. In context to what we do with Bike Hugger, the talk is about Changing the World with Bikes and includes thinking about socializing the good. That’s a term I use to describe how we should use our blogging talents for more than telling the world how cool we are. Many of us bloggers are wondering what have we wrought when these tools we built, these tools of a revolution, ended up being used for marketing, SEO, and ROI stats.

My social media lament became very apparent when I came back to Seattle from Vancouver and statused:

It can get surreal sometimes, this blogging work; while shooting a needle exchange clinic and homeless teens in an art collective, Twitter lights up with Kevin Smith’s people of size protest, and Sarah Silverman saying retard at Ted. What’s more important?

The age of self-importance at some point must make way for community. I just saw the media makers in Vancouver, like KK+, Robert Scales and their homeboys at W2, doing just that.

iPad: Email is for Old People, So Are Desktops

2010-02-04T14:43:46Z

Anyone with a dog in the iPad hunt has posted something more thoughtful than “it sucks” or “want” by now. After selectively scanning the various provocative posts, I chose Mule Design’s blog to leave a comment. It begins with, “email is for old people” and follows Mike Monteiro’s point that, “the iPad isn’t the future of computing; it’s a replacement for computing.”

Image by Mule Design.

That’s the prevailing thinking and agreed.

the next-generation has no allegiance to the platform and none to the desktop metaphor or “drilling down into the OS,” like the old people do.

They’re using the tools we built for them and aren’t entrenched in the choices we made and battles we fought during the dotcoms and Web 2.0. To us, our life’s work is in these apps and to them it’s just another site to say, “hello.”

I realized this yes when my daughter told me email is for old people, but also upon discovering formspring.me last week. Adrian, my daughter, and her friends all have Tumblr blogs and sometimes want comments on them, so they go over to Formspring.me. They jump back and forth like that without concern for “Drupal, Movable Type, or Wordpress.”

With a Macbook, PC, or Tablet, they’ll go there to check their myspace and maybe an email from Dad, but they don’t care if it’s folders or icons they open up. Doesn’t matter if they touch it, mouse it, or text it. That’s not their battle. It is and was ours.

Uncool

More interesting in the iPad debates is what’s happening culturally. As I said in the comment, I personally don’t care what snark-driven, click-through-ad-chasing, bloggers care about my buying decisions and neither does my daughter and her friends. In the blogging revolution, we upended traditional media, gatekeepers, and tastemakers.

Now we’re seeing the death of uncool. Brian Eno wrote about that last year in a post for Prospect Magazine

There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance.

He’s writing about music styles, but the same thinking can apply to gadgets and consumer products.

As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas.

Where 14-yr olds click from social networks to blogs and back they’ll also choose their personal trends in gadgets, in whatever manner makes sense to them. I think with little regard to who makes it and what we say about it on Twitter.

PCs had their chance and failed to deliver a touch-screen tablet. Apple has one now and it’ll sell. Is it a replacement for computing, as Mike says? Sure and another device and platform will come later for the next generation.

The Iliad

2010-01-31T02:26:16Z

Lots going on in this photo, besides the Funky Cool Lion of the 60s. Had I taken that professor career path, would want to live in a building called the Iliad. Hope when that building gets torn down, someone saves the Lion.

Uploaded by Hugger Industries | more from the dreeping set on Flickr.

Dreeping: Fountain at Night

2010-01-26T15:56:56Z

The fountain at the Marion Oliver McCaw Hall House at the Seattle Center.

Uploaded by Hugger Industries | more from the dreeping set on Flickr.

UI Stencils: iPhone

2010-01-25T18:33:12Z

While user experience isn’t our thing at TDI, liked these iPhone UI stencils and sticky notes. They’re made by Design Commission. They hosted the Refresh Seattle talk last week.

Uploaded by Hugger Industries | more from the dreeping set on Flickr.

Design the Ordinary like this Fixie

2010-01-20T18:23:53Z

Talking about bikes and web design at Refresh Seattle tomorrow night with Kevin Tamura from Blue Flavor:

Design the Ordinary like this Fixie explains how fixies are a good study in form and function for web designers. Fixies were built by cyclists from ordinary parts to serve a specific function and they’ve become part of pop culture. We’ll discuss topics like

What if consumers, like bike messengers making fixies, built a purpose-built website to do one thing? What would that look like?

Kevin and I are also presenting this talk at Microsoft Mix10.

Buffalo Stance @ SXSW

2010-01-14T17:31:11Z

We like to kick off the SXSW season by watching this video.

It well represents the serendipity of the event. Sure SXSW has changed in recent years, but is rooted in people like this whom built the web apps we’re using today.

I’ve talked about a variety of topics at SXSW, been on panels, and last year it was interestingness. This year, I’m talking with Livestrong CEO Doug Ulman about Changing the World and Lives with Bikes. The blog I publish, Bike Hugger, is also back at SXSW for another Mobile Social with Mellow Johnnys.

And maybe you were not previously aware of the Buffalo Stance Meme on flickr:

Guero’s, March 10 2002 uploaded by anildash | more from the dreeping set on Flickr.

Textura Design Blog

Bike Hugger in the New York Times

Speaking Season 2010

Secretary Clinton Meets With Argentine President on Twitter

Winter Olympics: Contrasts

Socializing the Good

iPad: Email is for Old People, So Are Desktops

Uncool

Related links

The Iliad

Dreeping: Fountain at Night

UI Stencils: iPhone

Design the Ordinary like this Fixie

Buffalo Stance @ SXSW