I’ve spent most of my visit to Picnic this year huneybee’ing about, along with the marvellous bumblebees, wasps, ladybugs, dragonflies and also the occasional gadfly.

The overall theme this year is “Picnic 2011: Urban Futures,” which is very much a continuation of the conversation many of us have been having for some time now. The whole Smart/Digital/Cognitive Cities, Open/Civic Data, Ubiquitous Computing thing… it’s a big topic and it’s all moving forward and that’s good.

A few thoughts for me, dipping about as I did, have been these:

Data is real, you can feel it.
The same distinctions we see in knowledge and social spheres, between the “virtual” and the “physical” are very present in this domain as well. We talk of the data, we talk of virtuality, of highly abstract systems and mashups and visualisations… and yet… More than any other domain affected by network connectedness, urban computing’s interfaces are very much physical. The sensors are there, the card readers are there… the policies and services to make our lives better manifest themselves in totally physical ways.

Perhaps it’s a semantic twist? Perhaps if we spoke not of “virtual” or “cyber”, but of “informational”? The symbiotic dance of the informational and the physical modes of the world, one as “real” as the other, and the line between between them becoming increasingly fuzzy.

Is my longterm long distance relationship any less “real” because it is largely manifested via short text messages, instead of glances and holding of hands?

Is the designation of bike lanes and reflowing of public transport services any less real because it is shaped by real time data?

Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable Cities Lab, and a few others showed an image (the header graphic for the “LIVE Singapore” project) which I had been handwavingly explaining for years: we have begun pinning the informational space to the physical space in earnest. It’s been going on for a very long time, but now it’s happening in a binding way–via timestamps, geostamps, socialstamps– with every interaction with that information space. For all intents and purposes, they are bonding.

(Fans of anime like Ghost in The Shell, Dennou Coil, Serial Experiment: Lain, etc as well as zen buddhists… will smile.)

We’re all saying the same thing, just using different words and models
This is a bit frustrating, but perfectly normal. We won’t ever all “get it” the same way, but the level we are still at here is a bit chaotic, and the stage is still litered with people trying to coin their terms and impose their mental models, rather than just agree on some of the elementals.

Observing this gives me all the more sympathy for bodies like the W3C et al who kill themselves trying to define standards for things that to many people are still profoundly arcane abstractions (but as we see, are very real, very affective.)

Carry on! I won’t join the fray. For now.

People appreciate the music, not the notes
Paraphrasing Sami Niemelä, who mentioned this in a Q&A session and kindly elaborated during a brief chat in the hotel lobby. In this case, he was remarking how everyone is talking about “the data”, where really what people care about is what comes out of that data. The “music”, the actualization, the experience based on the notes, is what is important.

This reminds me now, conversely, of conversations with Errolson Hugh, of Acrnm, where we speak of how we design the flow, the experience, and the thing shapes around that.

Authorship is an implicit fact, ownership is neither.
This popped out of me in the same aforementioned Q&A (at the end of an excellent panel featuring friends Usman Haque and Scott Burnham discussing trust of data).

The words came after the conversation turned to Intellectual Property rights. Many of us live in creative cultures which find themselves in a time where the claim of ownership (which is an abstract notion and not some physical fact) is implicit in authorship (which is a physical fact and event). The tension we are experiencing here is that with the changes in technology, we need to realise that a) ownership is not a fact but a claim and b) it is something we must state explicitly and not expect implicitly. Then the question is there is any value in doing so either way remains…

You don’t teach trust, you earn it
In the aforementioned panel on “Designing trust for the Internet of Things” (or something like that ;) it was remarked, again, how hard it is for people to “get” the importance of security and awareness and privacy etc etc in the seemingly highly abstract (invisible?) networked world. Locks on SSL secured websites, versus the lock on your housedoor, for example.
It struck me that at the root of the dilemma was a lacking mechanism for people to truly grasp the risks, to appreciate the value and the cost of not being aware, of not getting to a point where not only they get it but they also trust it all. USman pointed out rightly that we’re generally quite bad at assessing risk and value… and opportunity. Which gave me pause, for I always love to frame design as a sort of criminal activity: Means, Motive and Opportunity.

Something to mull over some more. :)

Probably lots more kicking around in my head, but it’s time to go.
I’d like to thank particularly some folks who made this visit really marvellous:
Usman Haque, Igor Schwarzmann, Peter Bihr, David Bausola, Juha van ‘t Zelfde, Scott Burnham, Jon Husband, Toby Barnes. Thank you. :)

I have walked into a grocery store,
and there is my father.
Holding up a packaged chicken,
and smiling broadly.

I woke up, pleasantly confused.

Ten minutes later, I read about Israel’s deadly attack on the “Freedom Flotilla”
which was attempting to bring aid to Gaza.

On the morning of September 11th, 2001,
I had also fallen back asleep;
a deep deep sleep.
And I had also dreamt of my father then.
We were standing on the beach I grew up on.
We watched a plane fall out of the sky, into the lake.

He turned, smiling; looked at me and said:
“Well there’s something you don’t see everyday.”

Prince Wen Hui’s cook
Was cutting up an ox.
Out went a hand,
Down went a shoulder,
He planted a foot,
He pressed with a knee
The ox fell apart
With a whisper,
The bright cleaver murmured
Like a gentle wind.
Rhythm! Timing!
Like a sacred dance,
Like “The Mulberry Grove”
Like ancient harmonies!

“Good work!” the Prince exclaimed,
“Your method is faultless!”
“Method?” said the cook
Laying aside his cleaver,
“What I follow is Tao
Beyond all methods!

“When I first began
To cut up oxen
I would see before me
The whole ox
All in one mass.
“After three years
I no longer saw this mass.
I saw the distinctions.

“But now, I see nothing
With the eye. My whole being
Apprehends.
My senses are idle. The spirit
Free to work without plan
Follows its own instinct
Guided by natural line,
By the secret opening,
The hidden space,
My cleaver finds its own way.
I cut through no joint, chop no bone.

“A great cook needs a new chopper
Once a year – he cuts.
A poor cook needs a new one
Every month – he hacks!

“I have used this same cleaver
Nineteen years.
It has cut up
A thousand oxen.
Its edge is as keen
As if newly sharpened.
“There are spaces in the joints;
The blade is thin and keen:
When this thinness
Finds that space
There is all the room you need!
It goes like a breeze!
Hence I have this cleaver
Nineteen years
As if newly sharpened!

“True, there are sometimes
Tough joints. I feel them coming,
I slow down, I watch closely,
Hold back, barely move the blade,
And whump! the part falls away
Landing like a clod of earth.

“Then I withdraw the blade,
I stand still
And let the joy of the work
Sink in.
I clean the blade
And put it away.”

Prince Wen Hui said,
“This is it! My cook has shown me
How I ought to live
My own life!”

– Zhuangzi (translated by Thomas Merton)

Approaching any situation or task from a variety of perspectives invariably gives one the ability to more fully understand and engage with it.

When approaching the job of designing something with the ability of multiple perspectives, which one might gain with a “refined knowledge of the ways of the world cultivated especially through wide experience,” with an eye towards simplicity and straighforwardness, the result can perhaps be deemed to be “sophisticated simplicity.”

It is the kind of simplicity that comes out of the process of wittling down a thing that often times is by nature quite complex, by considering many of the factors, issues, possibilities, opportunities, ramifications, desires and needs involved.

And doing so with the kind of style and taste one might also accrue with “refined knowledge of the ways of the world cultivated especially through wide experience.”

You cannot say that a thing is or isn’t art, because if it isn’t, what is it? You get into the game of having to define things, of which there is no getting out.

You cannot say art is good or bad, because good and bad are relative and subjective. Further, they don’t really exist and who the hell do you think YOU are to know the difference?

Your only choice, when presented with art, is to take it or leave it. Take from it whatever and as much as you can, or don’t.

The honest artist will pour everything into their art, precisely so you can keep taking. The cheap artist, well, doesn’t, and so you don’t get much. So you forget it.

In this view, art critics are dubious characters that you should avoid at all costs. They are in the business of making you believe a world of their making.

Art curators, on the other hand, are to be sought out and celebrated. For what they busy themselves with is finding, rounding up and presenting those artists that have something to give, something to say, something to share, that is in some way relevant to the world, now, and you should partake of it.

The work of the art curator is a sort of work of art in itself, so the honesty and cheapness stuff applies to them too. Corruption lies in wait everywhere.

How much of who we are is based on whom we’ve met.
How much of how we behave is based on whom we’ve observed.
What happens when everyone has learnt from watching the same subject?

Turn off your TVs. Now.

The unsustainability of our insatiable and really quite unreasonable desires and expectations.

We need to step back a few paces; undo some of the innovations and progresses we thought were a good idea but which turn out not to be so great…

Cars. Suburbs. Oil. Plastics in everything. Factory-made processed foods high in calories and efficiency, low in nutrients and real value. Carnivorous diets based on herbivores.

I don’t want to have to touch money anymore.
I don’t want to have to count or save money anymore.
I don’t want to have to fill out forms and deal with mounds of paperwork because of money anymore.

I don’t want money.
I do not want money anymore.

I don’t believe life is about working hard to make money.
I don’t believe life is about working hard and saving money.

I’d like to believe life is about working hard to do better things.
I’d like to believe life is about working hard to make life better.

I am so very very sick and tired of money.
I really really really hate money.

I of course acknowldge their importance in all interactions, and I certainly have many expectations myself, with regards to everything–people, relationships, events, situations, interactions–as we all do.

But I watch them closely, my expectations. I also try to detect as clearly as I can the expectations of others around me, whether they are expectations of me, or of something in their life, immediate or otherwise.