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TED Salon London 2009: Designing (for) Awareness.

2009-09-24T16:46:00.018+02:00

On September 21, 2009 I was lucky enough to speak at a TED Salon, held in London at the wonderful Unicorn Theatre for Children.
Tim Leberecht, Till Gruche, Sam Martin and the rest of the frog Marketing team have my respect and deep appreciation for creating (and giving me) this great opportunity, and for flawlessly organizing such a great event.
It was thrilling to breathe a TED-like atmosphere for an evening, and even though I tend to be relatively relaxed when talking in public the red 3-letter acronym glowing behind me on stage kept me on the edge more than I expected. Always interesting to learn something about yourself.

If you're curious you can read how the evening went overall on the TED blog, or you can take a look at some of the photos on Flickr.
Below you'll also find an extended transcript of my talk.
TED's infallible Bruno Giussani told me several times that "TED talks last 18 minutes, better plan for 16", so what I actually said was a much-distilled version of the text below.
And yes, I managed to stay on time and was not pulled off stage. Phew.
And no, unfortunately I do not think it was my best performance ever. Sigh.

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Designing (for) awareness

Can Design really help change the world?
Of course I think that the answer to this question is a loud "yes", but I also think that the question still stands, and the reason is simple.
If you asked designers for a definition of Design, you'd get back as many definitions as there are designers, but if you asked the same designers what they think they do best they would consistently tell you they see themselves as catalysts of change.
I share the same point of view: in the recent past Design has shed a perceived fixation on esthetics to become a credible future-shaping, world-changing discipline.
In this process designers have had to stop just relying on sheer intuition and creativity to meet their challenges, and developed a profound understanding of people's needs, hopes, desires and dreams, in addition to an ability to detect, trace and shape the boundaries of liquid socio-economic and technological scenarios.
One thing has not changed though: it is still all about love and passion, loving not just what we design, but who and where and when we design for. Future-proof design requires a genuine interest in human beings, and care for the spinning sphere they live on.

The downside of such love and passion for humanity coupled with an appetite for change is - at times - frustration.
I've become particularly intrigued lately by our apparent inability to modify our habits.
Why do most of us stick for example to behavioral patterns that we well know will hurt us individually in the short term, and collectively - as a species - in the long term?
I believe, like others, that the problem is a problem of awareness.
Without disturbing Buddhism I mean awareness as a profound, always-present consciousness that our accumulated decisions and actions, our behaviors and habits can have a huge impact.
The problem is that we don't notice what needs changing simply because we don't even know it's taking place, or we have a misguided sense of what we do and how we do it and how often.
But here are the good news.
There is something brewing at the intersection of design, technology and digitally-mediated social interactions that promises to reveal and make manifest the invisible cause-and-effect loops that tie our perceptions to our decisions and to our actions.
The result of giving visible and actionable substance to our otherwise invisible behavioral patterns will be a raised level of awareness about those very patterns, and thus an ability to reflect upon and ultimately change them, changing the world in return.

Let's make a concrete example: how fast is your heart beating right now?
I am sure that just by thinking about it some of you are breathing differently already, and as a result your pulse slowed down, or maybe it accelerated instead.
You've become all of a sudden aware of something we probably take for granted 99.9% of our time, that our heart is indeed beating... and beating just as fast as it needs to support us in whatever we're doing.
Bear with me as I take this one step further.
Some of you are probably involved in some form of physical exercise: jogging, running, cycling, whatever.
Some of you might use a heart rate monitor while training.
Those that do will usually report that being aware of one's heart rate while exercising deeply changes the way you train and even think about training, in the same way that people who meditate will tell you that becoming aware of one's breathing is the first step to actually change one's mental state.
Becoming aware of the physiological state of your own organism changes the way you consciously behave ultimately, which has an impact on the state of the organism in return.
This cause-effect loop is nothing new of course, and there's a term that defines it when that organism is the human body: biofeedback.

Here are a few questions that I'd like you to think about going forward.
What happens to our sense of self and to our behaviors when technology can extend and enhance our ability to sense and make sense of what's around us?
What happens when our nervous system ceases to be limited by the boundaries of our body, and extends into an artificial neural network of sorts we currently call the Internet?
What happens when our fallible memory is supported by tools that never forget our actions and decisions, tracked over extended periods of time?
This is what we'll be toying with in the next few minutes, pointing to a few paths worth exploring in the process, not necessarily to destinations.
For the rest of this talk I will superficially touch upon the four essential components of a potential product/service ecosystem focused on making our behavioral patterns - our habits - manifest, to enable us to reflect upon them, and possibly to decide to change them in return.
These components are: sensors and processing power everywhere, data streams, digital storage, information visualization and digitally-mediated social networks.

A short story first.
I've always been a fan of comics, and Iron Man has always been one of my favorites.
Iron Man is the super-alter-ego of pre-internet technologist and billionaire Tony Stark, but what is often forgotten is that the armor that gives him super-powers was originally conceived to help him cope with a heart condition derived from having been kidnapped.
The armor was first and foremost a life support system: Iron Man was originally a man with disabilities overcome through technology. More about this later.
In one of the recent evolutions of the Iron Man character, Tony Stark interfaces with his all-powerful exoskeleton through a sort of membrane on his bones.
The integration between the man and the technology he has invented has become absolute.
In a page from the comic he is seen talking to one of his assistants, who's warning him about potential dangers as he's ready to head out for another life-threatening mission.
He shrugs her words off: "I can see through satellites now" is his answer. He is already well aware of the information she brings to him. He can see it with his own eyes. Literally.
Which is to say that his nervous system now extends well beyond the boundaries of his body, that his behavior and decisions are now not just based on the information conveyed through his natural and limited senses.
We might not see through satellites - yet - but we are undergoing a silent shift that sees our behaviors and decisions influenced profoundly by a raised awareness of their impact on ourselves, on others and and on the environment surrounding us.

The key enabler for this shift comes in the form of access to our own data streams, and I'll use a personal anecdote to illustrate what I mean.
If you - like me - commute to work you might at one point have asked yourself a question similar to this one: how many times have I been on this bike/car/bus/train/airplane/spaceship?
If you - like me - have had to use a car to commute to work this question might be spurred by a desire to measure the sheer economic implications of such a decision, or maybe you wanted to gauge its impact on your carbon emissions.
Well, when it comes to me I can easily tell you that there are at least 3 independent systems that could provide a numerically exact answer to that question, but interestingly I have no access whatsoever to any of them.
In other words, I do not own or control the bit-crumbs that I leave behind me during all my various digitally-traceable activities.
This is ludicrous, and simply unacceptable.
We want access to our own data streams, we need to have access to our own data streams, and the reason is simple: we want to be able to mine them to extract meaningful information about ourselves.
Needless to say do so it is not enough to track what we do for short periods of time.
Patterns, meaningful patterns, sometimes emerge over months, years, even decades, especially if you consider a collective dimension.
Luckily ubiquitous wired and wireless broadband connectivity has led to the rise of so-called "Cloud Services", and if you couple this with digital storage following the equivalent of Moore's law you have all that's needed to store our data streams for good, for us to decide later on what best use for them we might think of.

Having access to one's own data streams, and service schemas to store them forever establishes the right foundation for the next layer.
Paraphrasing an old Italian Pirelli commercial: data is nothing without control (over it).
Raw data needs to be shaped into information first, then it needs to be communicated in a form that allows human beings to make sense of it, to turn information into knowledge.
In other words data needs to be made intelligible to become meaningful.
Time to move on to information visualization. Time for another quick anecdote.

When you'll have to take a taxi in the future make the effort to wait until you can hop on a Toyota Prius.
Wait a few seconds, then casually ask what that colorful display in the middle of the dashboard is showing.
What usually follows - and I've done this quite a few times now - is a long and passionate introduction to how that display has changed not only the way the taxi driver drives, but the way he thinks about driving.
Seeing in real time the effect of one's driving style on the energy efficiency of the vehicle quickly reverts the act of driving from a sequence of mostly automated tasks back to a conscious effort. After a while things go back to low cognitive involvement of course, but by then driving habits have changed.
"I can see inside my car's engine now", Iron Man would probably say.
This is the power of revealing and giving substance to things not seen.
Information used to be power, now information visualization is.

Information visualization is a multidisciplinary design domain that's been quickly rising in importance and impact: a critical mass of users whose mental model for digital assets is that of "un-curated accrual" has motivated a new generation of talented visual and interaction designers to try and help people to make sense of the overflowing complex data-sets they generate and have access to.
People like Carlo Ratti and his team at the MIT's SENSEable City Lab have created software solutions that detect unforeseen events, like traffic jams or natural catastrophes, by monitoring spikes in mobile traffic , while other companies like Stamen Design have seen projects like Cab Spotting, which shows San Francisco mapped through the traces left by the GPSs of taxis driving around the city, displayed at the MOMA.
Moodstats is another interesting prescient example dating back to the beginning of the new millennium, an application created by a group of talented designers called Cuban Council intended to track and even share people's mood over time.
More recently companies like Nike, Polar, Suunto or Nokia for example, have created opportunities for runners of all levels to see their performances mapped and tracked on the pages of a website.

There's a risk in all of this renewed fixation on the visual dimension though, actually two possible risks.
The first one is that we as designers see these graphics purely as an opportunity to draw beautiful, compelling images.
The second risk is that we underestimate the importance for people to be able to change the way the data is visualized.
That is to say that shaping information out of complex data-sets by giving it a visual representation can only be achieved by adding information to it: the graphic layer itself.
In other words still the point of view of the designer ends up standing between the data and the user.
Designers need to enable people to manipulate the data, and they especially need to make it possible for them to establish their own point of view on it, by modifying parameters and visualizations.
This is the difference between an artistic representation based on data, and software that enables people to reflect on behavioral patterns revealed by the same data.
We don't just want to look at cool-looking graphs, we want to be able to extract meaning from them, our own meaning.
We want tools, we want tools of self-reflection.

We now have lined up access to our own bitcrumbs, endless space to store them and ways to give them an actionable form.
Where will all these data streams come from?
An easy answer would be to just check in your pocket or bag, and pull out your mobile phone of choice, but it's actually time to go back to Iron Man and to how disabilities overcome through technology can teach us a thing or two.
We are going through a revolution when it comes to the role that cheap, ubiquitous processing power and sensors are playing.
I already mentioned Nike and the Nike+ partnership with Apple as a mass-market example of the role sensors will play in helping us track what we do, but they are not alone. For example Fitbit makes a wearable clip that tracks your movement 24/7, calculating calories burned and even sleeping patterns, while Yamaha has been making an MP3 player called Bodibeat that matches the beat of the music you're listening to to the rhythm of your heartbeat.
Along the same lines also gaming platforms have been - ahem - toying with similar ideas, the latest being the Wii and its Wii Vitality Sensor, which promises to make one's biostats the invisible joypad controlling your on-screen avatar.

If these examples show applications that put entertainment at the center, there's an industry sector in which we are seeing a sudden acceleration facilitated by cheap ubiquitous sensors and portable processing power, and that sector is Healthcare.
Spurred by an aging population, technological innovations and new service schemas that replace hospitalization with always-on at-home monitoring to reduce costs this industry is buzzing with innovative products that constantly monitor patients' biostats to help them cope with their ailments while improving their quality of life.

In diabetes management the new standard is called Continuous Glucose Monitoring, and Dexcom for example produces a solution that's comprised of a user-implanted sensor wirelessly feeding real-time blood glucose levels to a glucose meter. Similar competing systems also include an insulin pump, finally freeing patients from a life-disrupting routine that has them currently pierce their fingers for testing to then inject themselves with insulin when needed.
Proteus Biomed claims it will soon be making swallowable connected pills that will constantly send various biostats to a device worn on the body.
Finally frog design Milano is currently running with a few local partners a research program called E-monitors that also looks at this opportunity area, and will soon result in an open hardware-software platform for integrating a network of biosensors sending real-time data to a health-monitoring service via a last generation mobile phone.

All of these examples are indicative of an emerging product/service architecture that will likely be the reference for the near future when it comes to the body as an active node on The Network.
An implanted sensor transmitting wirelessly to a larger wearable device, which also exchanges data with other nearby devices and aggregates it, making it take the long jump straight to a remote server for long-term storage and further mining.?Mass-market enablers for this product/service architecture are already in place.?Devices like Apple's iPhone are now powerful enough to process massive amounts of data, and can easily act as bridges between �sensors� of all sorts and The Network itself.

This quickly consolidating model has prompted commentators like Lee Maguire to ask a very interesting question:
"So what happens when the device that records your medical status is also the device that you use to update your social connections?"
I personally think that the answer is fairly straightforward: "your heartbeat becomes a conversation", but the question this answer raises in return is even more interesting that the original question, at least in my opinion.
What will be the nature of this conversation?
I'll try to use a couple of other examples to point at a possible answer, and in doing so I'll touch upon the last component: the role that digitally mediated-social networks will play in this scenario.

Vitality's Glowcap is a product that can be described as an intelligent and connected pill bottle cap, and it does at least a couple of interesting things.
First it reminds users to take their medications, second it tracks if they are following their regimen, making a report accessible in various ways both to users themselves and to other people they select, including of course their doctor.
A few months ago I had a chance to speak with David Rose, the company's founder and CEO, and he mentioned that they are currently evaluating to create a way for the cap to publish real-time stats to a Facebook widget, so that people in your social network could see if you are indeed taking your medications.
"Why would anyone want to do that?" you are probably thinking. Well, to create self-imposed peer pressure to induce and reinforce virtuous behaviors.
If you know that other people know, you'll become in turn more aware of what you are doing... and even more importantly so will the others as well.
Individual behavior takes on a social and collective dimension: it becomes a conversation spurred and sustained over time by machines.

If the previous example was a bit unsettling here's another and even more controversial one, hinting again at the nature of the conversations that our data streams will be likely to spark in the future.
Bayer's Didget glucose meter is targeted to younger diabetes patients.
As you can easily imagine convincing children and youngsters to stick to a socially disrupting but life-saving routine that includes regular testing is difficult.
The Didget encourages them to take good care of themselves by integrating with the Nintendo gaming ecosystem, and turning regular testing into points that can be redeemed in that playful environment.
There's also a community of users where the social dimension is introduced to exchange personal experiences, and again points can be used to unlock features and the like.

Of course quite a few questions raise to the surface immediately in this case, and as a father of two young children I am sure you are asking yourself what I've been asking myself as well.
Is this even right? Is it ethical?
Well, as I said we're looking at paths, not destinations, so please contemplate your discomfort for a few seconds, if you can.
Because what this is ultimately all about is turning virtuous behavior into social currency. Nothing more.
Framed in this context, and with an element of "freedom of choice" associated with it I think this is an amazingly rich opportunity to turn our contemporary digital tools for managing social ties into support systems that will keep us adhering to behaviors that we agree are virtuous in nature.
It's taking tools of individual self-reflection and adding a collective dimension to them: I can see what others in my situation are doing, and can use this reference to motivate myself or others to do more, to do better, to do what we collectively agree is right.

And this is where I'll stop because at this point we're ready to wrap up this brief exploration, as we've touched upon all the intersecting opportunity areas I listed at the beginning.
Here are all the pieces once again, loosely joined:
- Access to our own data streams, and services to accrue and store our bitcrumbs forever
- Sensors and cheap ubiquitous processing power to generate those data streams and provide instant access to correlated real-time information
- Well-designed interactive tools of self-reflection to visualize, manipulate and shape raw data into meaningful information by revealing hidden behavioral patterns
- Social networks that encourage and sustain virtuous behavior by treating it as social currency and accumulated social capital/reputation.

Of course this field is ripe with new challenges and wicked problems.
How to design (for) awareness and self-reflection?
How to design platforms that people can use to encourage and challenge each other in following what they consider to be virtuous behaviors?
I strongly believe that it will be all about passion and love for humankind, again.

These are indeed good news, but it does not stop here, and here's why.
We have already factored the social and collective variable into the equation, but mostly in terms of possible benefits for individual participants. It is not difficult to imagine what would happen if we reversed the point of view from that of a single node in the (social) network to that of the network itself as the organism.
In other words if you don't consider what I just described so far as a solution but as a platform you'll immediately realize that it scales beautifully.
Let's go back to the Toyota Prius anecdote for a second.
What if all Toyota Priuses were networked, and their displays also showed how much fuel other drivers were saving?
What if drivers could subtly or playfully challenge each other to do so, collectively?
What if all cars had such a system onboard?
What if a similar system allowed residents to set local speed limits, or limit access to the streets where they live based on local pollution levels, detected by a network of sensors they own, mantain and control?
What if homes had displays, that showed real-time individual resource consumption levels in relationship to those of somebody's close friends, of their local neighborhood, of their urban area, of their country, of their continent, of the world?
How would their decisions, and actions, and habits change in such a scenario?
I believe they would.
I believe they will.

Making the invisible visible.

2009-06-11T13:54:00.002+02:00

From Time online's "How Nintendo's boss Satoru Iwata rewrote the rules of the game":

"Our meeting closes with a personal demonstration of Iwata�s latest new thing: the Wii Vitality Sensor.
Wii Vitality, which is expected to ship next year, is a small electronic thimble that sits on the end of a forefinger.
It uses light sensors to measure the flow of blood, extrapolating information about the internal workings of their bodies.
It is a natural complement to Nintendo�s existing health-oriented products such as Wii Fit and Brain Training.

'This is me in the office last Friday,' Iwata says, pointing at the video. 'I�m checking my relaxation levels. This can also sense whether you�re breathing in or out by the blood flow.'
A visual representation of a human silhouette fills slowly with blue water to chest level to show that Iwata is slightly stressed.
The sound of a metronome appears on screen, with breathing exercises.
'Now look how my relaxation level has changed.' The human silhouette is now slightly more full, of greener water.

This is what I find interesting, Iwata says. 'The idea of making something that is invisible, visible is fascinating.'"

Singing the body electric.

2009-06-10T13:53:00.028+02:00

I recently had the pleasure of speaking at Frontiers of Interaction V, the 5th instance of the conference conceived and lovingly produced by Matteo Penzo and Leandro Agr�, held in Rome this year in a spectacular setting.
As in the past it was a precious opportunity to share ideas about fascinating topics with interesting people, and to do so in Italy - where such occurrences are rare - was an added bonus.

This year the theme of the conference was "Social Networks, Internet of Things and Smart Cities", and as expected my personal highlights of the day were Adam Greenfield's "Elements of a networked urbanism" keynote, Matt Jones' "The new Negroponte switch", and Andrea Vaccari's presentation of the work he's done at the MIT's Senseable City Lab.
It was a pleasure to finally hear in person Adam articulate with his trademark clarity the (in-progress) key concepts underlying his upcoming new book, while Matt riffed on his recent joining of experimental design wunderstudio Schulze & Webb to talk about the current shift that sees products become less and less tangible as services actually follow the opposite path.
A few random words that will surely find their way back in my conversations in the upcoming weeks: the Gershenfeld-Negroponte switch, physical snap-on APIs, Thingfrastructure.
All in all it was a long and rewarding day, filled with stimulating conversations that will keep me creatively fueled up for a while.
What more can you ask for?

Given the themes of the conference and who was speaking after me I decided to steer clear of potential irrelevance, and had fun superficially exploring an area actually at the frontier of the day's very themes.
When the smart city of interconnected things will come to be � if it has not already � what will be the implications for its human inhabitants?
Even more vertically: what will living in such a techno-cultural milieu do to people's first-life avatar - to their body - and to their very perception of it?
I briefly touched upon "the body as a terminal" and "the body as a node", and left "the body as a conduit" for a longer timeframe.

What you'll read below (other than the ice-breaker intro, which I removed) is what I had originally set out to say.
Of course what I did say in the end was different. I think.
I always like to have a fairly solid narrative structure to follow for such events, but then I never rely on notes while I speak, to keep things open for the unexpected and leave enough tension to keep me on the edge a bit. Yes, I know, who cares.
In any case: you can use the words below to try and make sense of the slideshow just above them.
If you really like getting bored you can also watch the video of my talk.

Singing the body electric

I�ve been asked to be the first �in-person� speaker today, and tasked to somewhat open up the conference, so let�s start with a question: where is Ubicomp, metaphorically and physically?
We�re all familiar by now I think with Mark Weiser�s vision for it, and we all somewhat agree that we live today in one possible � and possibly embryonic � expression of that vision.
Thanks to our mobile phones, and laptops and wirelessly ubicomputing whatnots we live surrounded by things connected to The Network with a capital �n�.
This �subset� of Ubicomp is what I refer to as Ubi-conn, and it�s nicely summed up by a quote I�ve used many times.

"We are now in an era of pervasive networks and are thus more properly �in�, not �on� the network.
Careful choice of prepositions helps to think more clearly about not only the stakes of cohabiting with things within the networked world, but also for thinking about how to design experiences for this very different mode of occupancy."
Julian Bleeker, 2006

To paraphrase a famous European Vodafone campaign, Ubiconn is �all around us�. Invisible, but present.
Recently Timo Arnall created a video that beautifully visualizes this constant immersion in an all-pervading, invisible flow of bits.

Arguably the most tangible result of Ubiconn today is Ubi-comm, where things connected to The Network have us in turn communicate with one another, and now also increasingly with things themselves.
We live immersed in always-on conversations across channels and media, and if you have been a first-day Jaiku or Twitter user, or now run a Facebook app on your mobile phone of choice and use it often you�ll know what I mean.
In 2002 I had called this techno-cultural context �Connectedland�, and I had imagined that this constant connection to The Network would eventually become addictive, and that being detached from it would generate anxiety.
More recently Kevin Kelly gave a fascinating talk at TED 2008 titled �The next 5000 days of the web�, in which he spoke about the Internet evolving into the "One Machine", and pointed to the fact that we will be fully co-dependent upon it (and thus upon the tools that will sustain that very connection).
Yes.

Now within this context here�s the space I�d like to superficially explore today: how is this techno-cultural evolution changing our body and our perception of it?

The body as a terminal

You could say that this whole train of thought started a few years ago, in November 2005, while reading a Wired article written by Michael Chorost - �My Bionic Quest for Bolero� - which later became a book.
The author describes his own descent into a world of silence, and how he decides to undergo the most invasive treatment currently available to regain his hearing and experience again Ravel�s famous Bolero as he remembers it.

�A cochlear implant, as it is known, would trigger my auditory nerves with 16 electrodes that snaked inside my inner ear.�
Michael Chorost, 2005

What I found extremely fascinating about the unfortunate experience described in the article is that it basically talked about software augmenting the senses (a diminished sense in this case, but still).
As the author loaded different software releases into his high-tech hearing aid he could hear various sound ranges differently, until he found one combination that enabled him to experience his favorite music again the way he remembered hearing it naturally.
In other words, the article talked about mediating and enhancing our (auditory) perception of the world, through software.
Think about that for a second.
Many people would say that all our perceptions of the world are mediated though software, but I am talking about human-coded software in this case.

Weirdly enough though the question that came to mind there and then was: �When will we start to consider having a face to face conversation over the phone?�
See, I think we�ve all been there, overhearing somebody else�s conversation because other people were simply talking too loudly, because of the context.
Maybe they had no choice, they had to have that conversation right there and then, maybe they did not care, who knows.
But still.
Now enter the Jawbone.
This is not just a beautiful (Yves Behar-designed) Bluetooth headset, it also comes loaded with what they claim to be state-of-the-art noise-suppression technology.
This is software that basically eliminates all ambient noise and leaves your voice to be the signal.
Now.
Would you consider using this tool to talk to somebody face to face, if it allowed you to hear them better or if you just wanted more privacy?
Think about this for a minute.
I actually think I would.
I actually think I will, one of these days.

This is not an isolated example of course, as many hearing aids come with similar features.
For example Phonak � a swiss hearing-aid manufacturer (full disclosure: Phonak is one of frog design's current clients) - has a feature in their high-end products to fine-tune sound settings for specific contexts (even more interestingly hearing aids for kids need to leave �noise� in to get them to learn how to hear, but that�s completely off-topic).
Now bearing all of the above in mind consider Lyric Hearing.
This is a revolutionary (read: invisible) in-ear hearing aid, intended to be worn 24/7, for 30 days or more at a time.
Did anybody think �implant�?
Did anybody think �what if this was Bluetooth-enabled and it could connect to my mobile phone�?
Did anybody think "what about a version with noise-suppression for people without hearing disabilities"?
So did I.
Talk about �I am hearing voices�: such a combination might up the ante when it comes to making it difficult to tell global village fools from people that are just talking on their mobile phone.
We might soon all be hearing voices: our own conversations, relayed by the One Machine.

Contemplating your own discomfort

Time to switch sense and move to sight.
Visions of smart cities and spaces have shaped our collective imagination around augmented reality, an invisible digital layer overlaid on top of a visible physical one.
Common scenarios to reveal the hidden data layer usually involve �glasses of true seeing� of some sort.
Take for example the interesting work of Japanese designer Mac Fuminazu.
On his website - Petit Invention - he has created a series of concepts along these lines.
The idea is fairly simple: an invisible physical layer that makes the invisible digital layer visible.
Got it? Physically invisible makes visible the digitally invisible on top of the physically visible.
Anyway, these concepts are, well, nice, cute even, and their early commercial applications are already available.
For example Wikitude, an Adroid-based application, uses GPS and the camera of a mobile device to show Wikipedia entries overlayed on top of the physical landmarks they refer to.

Now.
Let�s look at another execution of the same idea.
Not so cute.
Quite the contrary even.
I will thus ask you for the first time today to do something I had to do myself when I first saw this concept, and others that will follow as well.
Play Buddhist and try to "contemplate your own discomfort": suspend judgment for a few minutes and ask yourself why that discomfort comes to be, and if it is just cultural � and thus could change � or if it goes deeper.
The reason why you should think about it is that I believe something like this mask will come, whether we like it or not, and it�s essential to consider implications sooner, rather than later.

This mask is a �mixed reality visor� designed by Ralph Bremenkamp, a talented colleague of mine at frog design.
The whole idea here is of course immersion, immersion in an alternative digital reality, but also of course disconnection, disconnection from the physical world surrounding the wearer.
It is basically a product to live full time in the "invisible digital layer" rather than in the "visible physical one".
It is also something that looks like it�s been grafted onto the face of the wearer.
Obviously it�s esthetically meant to appeal to current �extreme� communities and to a specific age range, but still.

Disabled enablement (more along the lines of the Wired article)

Of course at this point any Science Fiction fan will have zeroed-in onto where I am heading.
It�s been described in movies, comics, novels, you name the medium.
One reference to rule them all, following up on the mask you just saw: William Gibson�s Molly Millions and her vision-enhancing implanted mirror lenses.
Disturbing but cool, right?
Well... I�d like to avoid that tangent and follow another one.
When it comes to augmentations and cyborgs more realistic images like this one come to mind. These are mid-90's self-proclaimed "borgs" (read: geeks) at the MIT, overloaded with PC paraphernalia and looking � quite honestly � pretty ridiculous.
Of course these visions have evolved in the meantime, and just last year the tech world was abuzz with videos of Pranav Mistry�s 6th Sense, showing that cyborgs have gotten themselves better tools now.
Too bad that they are still wear(abl)ing things that bounce around their necks and hide in their backpacks.

Let�s now sit again on our discomfort for a second, and ask ourselves a question that�s just plain weird: �Would you give away an eye, to have it replaced with a camera?�
Anybody in their right of mind would (or should) answer a loud �no�.
But what If you were missing an eye in the first place?
As you might have read Rob Spence, who lost his right eye in a childhood accident, has been developing with a friend of his a prototype camera that will replace his artificial eye, and wirelessly beam video to a nearby screen or hard disk.
I think we�re all familiar by now with the concept of Lifelogging � capturing multimedia information about every single moment of one�s life � but this is something entirely different.
This is invisible technology built into the body that requires no effort on behalf of the wearer, following his every gaze and recording everything he sees unbeknownst to others around him.
What will this do our perception of one another?
What will this do to our memory-shaping practices?

Time to move on: here�s another video, which will have us focus away from our senses and onto our outer boundary, our skin.
This is what Philips Design calls a �design probe�, and it shows how some sort of nano sub-dermal e-ink will react to touch and pressure, enhancing our body and making it a dynamic surface for self-expression.
Somewhat sensual, and somewhat disturbing.
If you think this is science fiction you are of course right, but here�s a quasi-realistic implementation of what you just saw (it is a concept again, so I am cheating a bit).
This is a Bluetooth-enabled sub-dermal black & white screen.
Imagine using your phone, or any other Bluetooth-capable device, to beam images to it, so that they will show from under your skin.
Cool? Creepy? Yes, Indeed.

The body as a node

We've been briefly exploring the body as a terminal, as a destination for digital information if you will.
Then there's the body as a pulsating active node on The Network.
Of course there's the banal: the body's location in time and space turned into an always-on stream of bits. Google Latitude comes to mind.
Still in the same realm there are companies that build their service models on tracking data produced by the body as it's exercising, companies like Suunto, Polar or Nike.
Heart-rate monitors and pedometers and GPS watches of all kinds, now ready to stream biostats to a portable networked device.
Lately also Nintendo jumped into the melee with its Wii Vitality Sensor, which promises to use the gamer's heart rate to change playing conditions. Maybe.

I don�t need to tell you that healthcare is the field were most of these visions come with real business models and tangible economic incentives.
I am of course talking about constant monitoring of one's heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen and glucose levels etc.
Frog Milano is currently running with a few partners a research program called E-monitors that precisely looks at this opportunity area, and will result in the working prototype of an open platform for integrating a network of biosensors.

Here's another example along these lines, one where again we might all feel somewhat uncomfortable, but also an example of something that can make the difference for people suffering from diabetes, promising to greatly improve their quality of life: the Dexcom diabetes management system includes a self-implantable sensor, a small data-emitting pod that attaches to it and a glucose meter that can make sense of the data or drive an insulin pump directly.
The overall apparatus is still quite clunky to be honest, but you can easily see it as a promising first step towards nimbler executions.
In addition the whole idea of performing what is for all purposes self-micro-surgery is mind-boggling to say the least, but again just a glimpse of what lies ahead.

What all of the examples above point to it's clearly a basic product/service architecture that will likely be the reference for the near future when it comes to the body as a node.
Something sensing and implanted transmitting wirelessly to a larger wearable hub, which distributes data to other nearby devices and aggregates it, making it take the long jump straight to the One Machine for long-term storage and mining.
Mass-market enablers for this product/service infrastructure are already in place.
Devices like Apple's iPhone are now powerful enough to process massive amounts of data, and come with Bluetooth enhancements that enable them to act as bridges between �sensors� of all sorts and The Network itself.

The most interesting aspect here is that all of these scenarios see the body becoming for all purposes an always-on, always-connected, always-communicating source of biodata, pulsating bits with its every heartbeat.

Infamous last words

One last consideration, one last reference and one last (weird) question.

Here�s the last consideration.
Remember Timo Arnall�s video at the beginning?
In the future that thing absorbing and beaming invisible bits won�t be a device you�ll be wearing.
It will be you.

Here's the last reference.
In one of the latest evolutions of the Iron-Man character Tony Stark controls his all-empowering metal suit by interfacing with it directly through a membrane on his bones, no interface strings attached.
At one point he reveals: "I can see through satellites now."
We know how that feels by now, right?

Here�s the last question.
�How quickly is a digitally augmented, mixed reality leading us to feel the need for an augmented body to fully take advantage of it?�
In other words: would you give an eye to see through satellites?

Davide.

2009-04-21T10:12:00.000+02:00

Our baby boy Davide was born today, at 10:12 AM.
Welcome to the world little one, our hearts instantly expanded to house double the love.

LIFT 09, future-proof design.

2009-03-11T15:32:00.016+01:00

I recently had the luck of spending a few stimulating days at LIFT 09.
As in the past the pre-conference workshops and two full days of interesting conversations flooded my slow brain with ideas that have started sedimenting, hopefully to then resurface in my thinking patterns in the upcoming months.

I found many talks to be particularly relevant - Nicolas Nova's thoughts on how to learn from "failed futures", David Rose's musings on basic human needs and leveraging magic as a metaphor for connected products, Matt Webb's usual mix of genius and madness and Anab Jain's fantastic video reportages from Little Brinkland - but it was Dan Hill's presentation that stood out as my personal highlight from the whole conference.
What made Dan's talk great was not just the content - a rich introduction to the upcoming challenges and opportunities posed by Urban Informatics - but also the way in which he supported his argument with almost-real-time storytelling layered over a masterfully orchestrated sequence of images and quotes interspersed with videos. Favorite quote: "No matter how good the hard infrastructure is, it�s the soft infrastructure that defines the experience.".

An added pleasure for me this year was also getting to speak in front of LIFT attendees in the "Design thinking for the future" session.

When first offered this opportunity this is what I had sent in:

"An old project management saying states that "plans are useless, but planning is indispensable".
Something along the same lines could be probably said about future-shaping practices.
Visions of the Future are often useless, but the act of envisioning them is not.
3D flying virtual assistants, 1984-like nightmares, Asimov-inspired robots, videophones and even flying cars are here, they are just not evenly distributed, and they might never be.

Truth is that many designers dream of spending their professional lives telling stories about the Future, and shaping systems of products and services that populate those stories like props in a movie.
Historically Design-at-large has been the discipline arisen to help the industry-at-large give form to artifacts fit for a given cultural milieu, artifacts that in turn usually end up influencing and changing that very cultural milieu, and thus its future.
What's interesting is that the sheer amount of these stories today vastly overwhelms their "rate of absorption": the necessary cultural humus for a vision to grow onto is continuously washed away by the next wave of seducing - albeit often utopic or dystopic - hypotheses.
In other words the potential culture(s) of use that could take shape around any and all of these visions simply cannot keep up with the ever-accelerating production of competing images depicting the next "perfect" - and often branded - future we will be living in so-very-soon.

Perhaps part of the problem stems from a model of time that's still very Newtonian: an infinite horizontal Cartesian axis pointed right. Within this model the Future appears to be an infinite resource.
Recently we have been forced to ask ourselves if that is actually the case.
We live on a planet that shows worrying signs of weariness.
We live in a world where economies recursively crumble under their own unsustainable weight.
We live in a world that has by now realized that technology solves as many problems as those it creates anew.

In addition to this our fixation with pro-jecting ourselves "beyond the beyond" into possible futures also appears to be strangely at odds with technologies that give us superhuman memory accrual capabilities. Our always-on devices and servers never, ever forget.
What we might be starting to realize is that to create something new we need to still have an "empty" space for it to take shape, and that space might be reducing.
Should we teach our digital tools to forget, so that we can as well? Maybe.

Design with a capital D is changing and reshaping its practices and philosophies to face these new challenges.
Form is on a new quest for meaning, rather than just function or emotion.
In the meantime the people formerly known as consumers and users have stopped listening to somebody else's tales from the future, and are now actively telling their own.
What's emerging is a dynamic dialogue, an ever-evolving conversation among all parties involved, with designers (hopefully) gearing up to act as maieutic catalysts of change."

After all was said and done this is what I presented:

If you've got 20 minutes to waste you can also watch the video:

frog design's Tim Leberecht's LIFT 09 report kindly included also a nice summary of my brief talk, and I will shamelessly re-post it here:

"(Fabio) used the case study of Project Masiluleke (a large-scale initiative that leverages mobile technologies to combat HIV/AIDS in South Africa) to illustrate a model of design that 'is not just about creating compelling visions of perfect futures but rather shaping presents that are betas of a future we want to live in'.
Quoting an Italian bus customer ("In the past you had to stamp the ticket, now you simply have to caress the machine."), he spanned the arch from 'form follows function' to 'form follows emotion' to 'form follows meaning' (design that resonates with people's value systems). Empathy, technology as 'a material to sketch with', people-centered user experiences, and social impact � these are the characteristics of 'meaningful design'.
Empathy, in particular, is not only the foundation for meaningful social innovation projects (pro-bono or for-profit), it is also the very prerequisite for every act of human cooperation."

Could not have said it better.
Also much kudos and lots of respect to Robert Fabricant and the rest of the frog NY team that worked on Project M: I undeservedly basked in the light you guys cast with your good work. Thank you.

Chapeau to Laurent Haug and Nicolas Nova for once again putting together a flawlessly-organized unconference, for the crazy 700+ people fondue and for LIFT's famously relaxed atmosphere that encouraged precious conversations with lots of interesting fellow t(h)inkerers and old pals like Anne Galloway, Fabien Girardin and Stephen Blyth.

Designing for the Segment of One.

2009-02-15T17:25:00.010+01:00

In June 2007 I was kindly invited to speak at From Business to Buttons, an interesting design conference that this year will celebrate its third anniversary.

My talk was entitled "Designing for the Segment of One", and looked at networked handheld devices in relation to the specific needs of individuals.
I realized I never got around to link to the presentation, which I immodestly believe is in many ways still relevant.

"People increasingly expect products and services not only to fit their specific needs and desires, but also to adapt to how they evolve and change over time.
Companies have tried to provide an answer by putting "users" at the center of the development process, and offering customers opportunities to influence at times some - and other times most - of a product's characteristics.

Networked handheld devices, the objects currently known as mobile phones, are quintessentially personal tools, tools that have become essential to many of our daily activities. Strangely enough most of these devices still lack structural ways to fine-tune their specifications to the needs of individuals, and commonly offer only superficial opportunities for customization.

What will be required to give networked handheld devices the level of dynamically adaptive flexibility increasingly expected by their users?
How to achieve simplicity, and not just simplification, in the process?"

For those that are reading this late at night and have already counted more sheeps than they care to remember there's also a video of yours truly from the conference.
Guaranteed to deliver much-needed rest in 5 minutes or less.

A gentle self-reminder.

2008-09-19T10:39:00.005+02:00

Good design is innovative

It does not copy existing product forms, nor does it produce any kind of novelty for the sake of it.
The essence of innovation must be clearly seen in all functions of a product.
The possibilities in this respect are by no means exhausted.
Technological development keeps offering new chances for innovative solutions.

Good design makes a product useful

A product is bought in order to be used. It must serve a defined purpose � in both primary and additional functions.
The most important task of design is to optimise the utility of a product.

Good design is aesthetic

The aesthetic quality of a product � and the fascination it inspires � is an integral part of the its utility.
Without doubt, it is uncomfortable and tiring to have to put up with products that are confusing, that get on your nerves, that you are unable to relate to. However, it has always been a hard task to argue about aesthetic quality, for two reasons.
Firstly, it is difficult to talk about anything visual, since words have a different meaning for different people.
Secondly, aesthetic quality deals with details, subtle shades, harmony and the equilibrium of a whole variety of visual elements. A good eye is required, schooled by years and years of experience, in order to be able to draw the right conclusion.

Good design helps a product to be understood

It clarifies the structure of the product. Better still, it can make the product talk.
At best, it is self-explanatory and saves you the long, tedious perusal of the operating manual.

Good design is unobtrusive

Products that satisfy this criterion are tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art.
Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained leaving room for the user�s self-expression.

Good design is honest

An honestly-designed product must not claim features it does not have � being more innovative, more efficient, of higher value.
It must not influence or manipulate buyers and users.

Good design is durable

It is nothing trendy that might be out-of-date tomorrow.
This is one of the major differences between well-designed products and trivial objects for a waste-producing society.
Waste must no longer be tolerated.

Good design is consistent to the last detail

Thoroughness and accuracy of design are synonymous with the product and its functions, as seen through the eyes of the user.

Good design is concerned with the environment

Design must contribute towards a stable environment and a sensible use of raw materials.
This means considering not only actual pollution, but also the visual pollution and destruction of our environment.

Good design is as little design as possible

Back to purity, back to simplicity.

(Dieter Rams)

Heaven.

2008-09-19T08:19:00.002+02:00

"From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life.
I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention.

At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow.
If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature.

At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive.
May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie."

"If only Heaven will give me just another ten years... just another five more years, then I could become a real painter."

(Hokusai)

Through the glass.

2008-05-07T12:01:00.004+02:00

He watched the paper cup fall on the dusty sidewalk.
Dirty little liquid fingers, forced by the incline to ebb towards the gutter.
Hurried feet, tip-tapping across the flood.
He looked at the cup in his hands.
At his own feet.

Finding beauty in the everyday.

2008-05-06T12:01:00.004+02:00

Mike Bukhin interviewed on Nokia's N-Series blog:

"A number of my projects iterate on the same theme, finding beauty in the everyday and giving new perspectives to the ordinary.
I want my participants to reevaluate the exceptional moments in their lives - I want them to feel that their everyday life is in fact exceptional. And if they don't feel that their everyday is exceptional, I want to provide them with tools that will help them change.
While we are caught up in the minutia of the everyday, we tend to lose perspective and close ourselves off to other possibilities. My work tries to remedy this condition.

I try to build tools and mobile experiences that are low overhead and low commitment.
With the applications I build, you don't have to step out of your life to get an alternative perspective on your everyday.
It is either presented to you automatically or is alongside you, available whenever you are interested in something new."

Could easily be my current manifesto.

The beauty of the world.

2008-01-15T12:07:00.002+01:00

"He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret.
He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of divergent equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."

(Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses)

Andrea.

2007-03-02T16:00:00.000+01:00

Our baby boy Andrea was born today, at 4:00 PM.
Welcome to the world little one, we love you.

Selfish sovereign posture artifacts.

2007-02-25T15:33:00.000+01:00

From twitter:

Adam Greenfield:
"@ = an indicator that Twitter is stretched to its limits as an application"

Matt Webb:
"The @ tips twitter from ambient-people-nearby into a constant-thread-to-follow. i like ambient, so i have to unfollow friends who use it :( "

Elsewhere:

Khoi Vinh:
"Twitter � and most any Web site � is something of a sovereign posture application, programs that are best used full-screen, monopolizing the user�s attention for long periods of time.
Twitterific, by contrast, takes the exact same functionality, and presents it in an auxiliary posture, where it occupies much less screen real estate and only partial attention."

Elsewhere still:

Jan Chiphase:
"The electric toothbrush is a selfish object - it demands to be held the whole time it is used, and the alternative that works with regular tooth brushes - to be clasped in the mouth for those moments when you need both hands - is not an option.
How well will two-handed devices fair in what is more many people a one-handed multi-tasking world?"

The product (is the system) is the culture of use.

2007-02-24T02:00:00.001+01:00

I've been reading with increasing interest the distributed conversation around why it's essential to consider systems and not just products when what really matters in the end is the user experience.
Adam Richardson started it all by coining the mantra "The product is the system":

"For a product to feel harmonious, the system that surrounds it must be harmonious.".

Peter Merholz, picked the ball and ran with it in his "Stop Designing Products" presentation (PDF, 1.2 MB).
It was then the turn of Brandon Schauer to point out, the hidden implications of the re-design of the Target pill bottle:

"The Target pill bottle isn�t a bottle, it�s a system."

Adam Greenfield then put an Everyware spin on the whole thing, in his unmistakable style:

"You can no longer safely assume that your product will stand alone.
Your product needs to tell me what it can do, and what I can do with it."

Finally it was again up to Peter Merholz to do a bit of useful aggregating:

"If you want to deliver on an experience, as opposed to simply a set of features, it�s becoming clear you must take a systems view."

And that's where it's at in the end: if you want to get your hands dirty with experience design you'll have to take into account the whole socio-economic context within which that experience will be situated.
Still I was left wanting for more, because the inherent implications of the very definition of the term "experience" set the bar quite high:

"The conscious events that make up an individual life.
The events that make up the conscious past of a community or nation or humankind generally.
The act or process of directly perceiving events or reality."

One word of caution before we proceed.
What follows carelessly disregards the fact that my understanding of the subject matter is superficial at best, so if you proceed expecting anything other than seat-of-the-pants reasoning please think again.
Readers forewarned.

What I find myself recalling when it comes to systems and products is a conversation I had a long time ago with Anne Galloway about the chicken-and-egg relationship between human cultures and the tools they produce.
I distinctly remember resorting to, ahem, Star Trek to fuel my feeble argument.
In one of the most memorable episodes of the second season Captain James T. Kirk and his (non-red-suit-wearing) posse survive visiting a planet where a whole culture has evolved out of one artifact left on the planet by a previous careless group of human visitors: a book about "Chicago Mobs of the Twenties".
Over the course of one hundred years the influence of the book on the alien culture caused the whole civilization to become a de-facto replica of the gangster-ridden city: just think cult of an "Al Capone bible" gone planetary.
Albeit the basic assumption of the episode was clearly an over-simplified dramatization at best, it always struck me as oddly fascinating.

If you are still wondering what I am after please consider the iPod, or the aforementioned Target pill bottle.
The iPod-iTunes ecosystem is undoubtedly one of the current best examples of "the product is the system" designed right, but what we are also seeing though is the effect over time of a culture of use where existing weak signals have been amplified by tools and services shaped by that very culture.
While the key value proposition of the original iPod - "all your music, always with you" - was disruptive from day one - October 23, 2001 - it's probably safe to say that the ecosystem that evolved over time around it would have fallen on deaf ears if it had been offered in its current incarnation on that same day to the same customers.
When the Music Store module of iTunes was launched in April 2003, the iPod had already created a culture of use that had replaced the album with the song as the new atomic experiential unit.
In other words it took a couple of years to create a culture of use around the iPod that made its success and that of its ecosystem possible, and even then it took another year before sales started to show signs of what was about to happen: today's apparently unsheakable market domination.
A cause amplified in return by its effect, a cultural Larsen effect of sorts.
Similarly the new Target pill bottle is another good example of the redesign of a whole culture of use, with the artifact acting as the catalyst that speeds up the process.

The reason why I tend to prefer the term "culture" to "system" in this context is because I find it less abstract and much more closely related to us, to human beings, but I also like it better because when it comes to experience, and designing conditions for an experience to take place, what designers are ultimately after is the creation of meaning: a newfound assessment of reality, a change in value systems.
This also brings me straight to another consideration: in what way is what I am saying different from Don Norman's famous curves of adoption of innovative technologies?
The identical component is the role that time plays in this context.
Time is an essential ingredient when it comes to a change in cultural paradigms, and thus also when designing systems and cultural stratifications of meaning.
What is different is that Don Norman's diagrams seem to assume that the enabling factor is the level of maturity of the technology, but in this context what's just as important is the level of maturity of the potential culture of use related to that technology.
As participants to the "Designing the Future workshop heard at LIFT 07, even disruptive innovations that seem to appear out of nowhere are often rooted in specific existing cultural models, or have cyclically surfaced in different incarnations without finding the appropriate substrate to grow upon.
It's not just just the maturity of a technology that counts, it's also how strong the cultural weak signals that specific new technology is going to amplify are.
Who knows, maybe even the videophone will have a chance, one of these days.

Another consideration is that many parallel cultures of use exist around the same product.
Take Digital Rights Management for example.
There was a time when DRM was actually a product, a product invented specifically to migrate a previous value system into a new socio-economic scenario that was already showing signs of a possible singularity.
The funny thing about DRM is that those who today suffer from it (us) probably shared its underlying values at the very beginning, then over time the culture of use around new tools like the iPod changed their beliefs, and today we're at the point where the CEO of the most successful online music retailer writes a (much criticized) open letter asking its partners to get rid of the same feature that is currently bundled with each and every one of many of his products, and even music industry execs admit that they actually don't believe in the effectiveness of what they officially endorse.
DRM will probably disappear, and all seems to hint it will go in the worst way, leaving a rotting carcass everyone in the ecosystem will have to climb over to move ahead, but that's the way things go when culture is involved.
Changes take time, and value systems are stratified and evolve at different speeds, and that needs to be accounted for when designing systems.
What is required is a shift in scales: from tasks and mental models to activities and cultural models.

I am almost ready to pass the ball over again to the people listed at the very beginning of this entry - who will probably show me the error of my ways first - but there's time for one final consideration.
Many of these discussions would benefit from the opinion of people active in the service design community. People like Chris Downs of Live | Work or Simona Maschi of CIID.
As Dan Saffer has recently noted there are so many distantly close design galaxies out there.
We need to get better at designing cross-disciplinary telescopes.

Twitter gems.

2007-02-22T10:38:00.000+01:00

"Contemporary culture is the interference pattern produced by intersecting standing waves in two universal solvents: money and binary."

Is it me or Adam Greenfield just writes beautifully?
Man am I enjoying his wordsmanship lately.

When illustration meets (clay) sculpture.

2007-02-15T22:39:00.000+01:00

Davide Longaretti and Mayuko Tazumi are not only among the nicest people I know, and just as talented, they are family... so I'll admittedly (and gladly) relinquish any objectivity when it comes to them and their work.

Their latest joint creative endeavor, inspired by Japanese folk tale Urashima Taro, combines Davide's minimalist illustrations with Mayuko's poetically playful clay environments, and earned them a selection at the Bologna Children Bookfair, which showcases the most innovative trends in the world of children illustration.

Davide, who runs Due mani non bastano together with two other illustrators, has also just released a set of 8 Postcards from Osaka, filled with beutifully colorful micro-narratives of his latest visit with Mayuko to her hometown (the set is also available for purchase, just email Davide).

If you happen to be one of freegorifero's long-time readers Davide's work will look familiar for a good reason, as I've been lucky enough to have his illustrations grace these pages a few times in the past.

LIFT 07, the people behind the memories.

2007-02-12T00:03:00.000+01:00

LIFT 07 has come and gone, and for the second time it left a sweet aftertaste.
The organization of the conference this year was impeccable (non-collaborative Wi-Fi notwithstanding), so much so that I was almost left with a desire for last year's slightly rougher edges.
As expected the talks took my level of interest on a roller-coaster ride, but also as expected the most cherished moments came when the bright lights and large crowds of the conference gave way to precious conversations with friends and people that's unfortunately hard to meet otherwise, because of distance and/or time.

On Wednesday a handful of bright souls braved chilling winds and the wrath of a Thai eco-terrorist restaurateur to pick up spicy conversations last enjoyed face to face under Berlin skies.
The following day dinner mixed Morrocan lemon chicken with equally delicious conversations about recent pasts and likely futures.
Lunch on Friday wonderfully showed that even if Interaction Ivrea is no more its heritage lives on, then late in the afternoon a moment of calm epiphany came while savoring the company of people I respect and admire.

It was a pleasure spending time with you. You are all missed already.
Safe travels back to New York, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Milano, Ivrea, Copenhagen, Chicago, Tokyo, Lausanne.

LIFT 07, day two.

2007-02-10T20:05:00.000+01:00

Here are my semi-rough notes from day two of LIFT 07.
Please notice: what follows is not necessarily what people literally said, but what I (think I) understood from the talks I attended.

Collective Intelligence and Collaborative Creativity : What do we need more?
Jaewoong Lee, CEO, Daum

I'll start by talking about the human brain: 100 billion neurons, each one networked with as many as 10.000 other ones, layers and layers of complexity.
When I founded the company I had this in mind, human beings as brain cells in a neural network.
On the other side you have the history of media: one to one, few to one/one to few, one to many, many to one, many to many. Now what?
There's something other than a fully Googled future, search engines are still not all-powerful, our time is limited and the quality of their results is still sub-optimal. Many of the tools similar to Google are also still too difficult to use for a lot of people.
Can the aggregating power of the collective provide a new solution?
Can people act as intelligent layers/filters and make it easier for people to find information that's relevant to them?

(Nice introduction, but not sure what the point was in the end. Collaborative filtering will save us from chaos? THE Google!)

Panel: The new economics of creation
How to make a living from creative work in the peer to peer and YouTube era?

John Buckman, Founder, Magnatune and BookMooch
Zhang Ga, Artistic Director / Curator, China International New Media Arts Exhibition 2008
Patrick Chappatte, Cartoonist/Journalist
Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz, CEO, vpod.tv

Patrick Chappatte
The world has gotten smaller, because of technology, but many of the promises of hyper-connected-ness have yet to be met: think China/third world/digital divide (show fantastically funny cartoons to get his points across, the audience roars and claps mid-talk, finally!)
John Buckman
I run a music website called Magnatune.
How to leverage consumer anger at the music industry (CD prices, poor quality, low diversity, musicians getting ripped off, DRM)?
Magnatune sells downloads and CDs, uses Creative Commons licensing, lets people decide how much they should pay, and half of the price goes directly to the musician. Makes people feel good about themselves.
We focus on the user experience, we get people to listen to the whole album with no need for registration, and we also make it really easy to license our music for movies, podcasts etc.
Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz
User-generated content is everywhere, and it has caused a paradigm shift: time and place and device shifting.
Is YouTube what video on the internet should be? No. Too much stuff. How do I find video content that's relevant to me? Joost is probably where we are all headed.
vpod.tv simplifies the creation of personal video channels, we help creators make their content available immediately to any and all kinds of devices.
Zhang Ga
Why is new media art so difficult to find in galleries and museums?

Blowing the web apart
Ivan Pope, Snipperoo

We need to break the web apart in bits and pieces, a "widget-ization" of pages into micro-elements that people can then re-assemble into their own collections.
This is already somewhat happening, but it needs to be taken to the next level.

(Well, er... yes.)

Understanding users, their needs and motivations
Jean-Francis Balaguer, User experience senior consultant, ELCA

Results from a study done on the website of the International Red Cross indicated that it lacked a clear focus on the needs and desires of its intended users.
We used various tools: online questionnaires, qualitative audience analysis, tested directly the quality of the interaction, analyzed the competing websites.
What did we learn? We identified four main scenarios: using the website to get quickly informed about IRC, using it for in-depth research, using it to get factoids, using it for education.
We created 5 user profiles (personas) and to structure the pages of the website we used participatory design techniques asking users to put together their "ideal page" by assembling content chunks on a wireframe (position, size etc.).
From the research we also realized that this kind of website has to seriously take into account the needs of developing countries: limited bandwidth (no video, few images), PDF not a real standard etc.

(Maybe it's because I've been hearing this stuff for years now, but takeaways from this session where limited to a few words: "floppy disks not dead yet".)

Work Environments for the Knowledge Age
Clark Elliott, Workplace Strategist

I am a socio-psychologist and architect, and I am going to bring you back to the physical world and the design of environments.
The french definition of work "travail" comes from the latin word for "torture", that's not an easy place to start.
What is "work" today? I see it simply as the intersection of people, space and technology.
Today companies are struggling to transform themselves from cultures driven by cost and control into ones driven by innovation.
The approach I take is activity-based design, and it's structured around what people do and who people do it with, with communication among people at the center: connect people and the way the exchange ideas.
Technology is freeing us to have new choices by increasing our mobility and allowing us to make the space visible, open, interactive.
Trends: people who like to work standing up, and don't need to have a desk; the ever-increasing importance given to break areas and places where people meet; opportunities for people to have privacy too (for example with indoor phone booths); re-purposeable areas that can flexibly adapt to the needs of casual occupiers (hot-desking etc.).
In the end it all comes to understanding the nature of the activities, and remembering that work is not a place you go to, it's something you do, it's where you are.

Embracing the real world's messiness
Fabien Girardin, Researcher, Pompeu Fabra University

How can we combine existing visions of Ubiquitous Computing with the inherent messiness of our physical world?
Currently the goal of UbiComp seems to be to achieve invisibility, seamlessness and calmness (in Marc Weiser's own terms).
Many of these scenarios are based on the assumption that we will be constantly surrounded by a "cloud of connectivity", but the truth is that it is not only hard to exploit this "cloud", but its very presence is also often discontinuous.
The world is messy: infrastructures break down, heterogeneity of existing standards is amazing (even basic things like electric plugs, remote controls etc.), competing technologies co-exist, ownership of enabling technologies is fragmented, cultural biases (shows hot and cold British water faucets spread apart) and unpredictability of contexts make for uncertainty of expectations.
What can be done?
One answer is "seamful design": revealing the boundaries, the limits, the inaccuracies, thus enabling people to better adapt to them.
Another one is "design for appropriation", treating people as actors, letting them play with technology and make it adapt to their needs.
Conclusion: when it comes to UbiComp are we really repeating the same errors of Artificial Intelligence, trying to solve all problems at once? Do we really want to live in a calm world?

(Very nice talk. Design beautiful seams! Fabien deserved more time and was the only "open stager" I heard that was not there to "advertise" anything except his interesting ideas.)

Panel: Dealing with technological overload
Is too much technology good for you? What are the consequences of our increasingly over-connected lifestyle?

Stefana Broadbent, Head of User Adoption Lab, Swisscom
Fred Mast, Professor, University of Lausanne
Nada Kakabadse, Professor, Northampton Business School
Matthias Luefkens (moderator)

Matthias Luefkens
How to define a "digital addict"?
Nada Kakabadse
As in all revolutions the digital revolution has made casualties.
The curve has gone from adaptation to addiction, with addiction defined as over-adaptation at the expenses of other aspects of life.
Consequences: online behavior conflicts with offline behavior (relationships deteriorate, children get neglected etc.) and typically work tends to override private life.
Just like any addiction also ICT addiction can be fought, by taking a critical approach to certain behaviors and habits.
Stefana Broadbent
I completely disagree, we observe how people use technology, and we've been doing that for 3 years now.
What we are seeing is actually the contrary: the private seeping more and more into work patterns, people using connectivity to keep in touch with family and loved ones also while at work.
Even employers are starting to get accustomed to the fact that workers expect to be online all the time, keeping their IM tethers to their friends open.
The difference between addiction in the traditional sense and what we are talking about now is that in most cases over-connectedness ultimately gives a sense of happiness, a feeling of having more possibilities, not added constraints.
(At this point attendees are asked by Nada to confess if they are "addicts", and the whole thing quickly turns for a while into one huge group therapy session. Luckily Bruno Giussani puts an end to it.)
Bruno Giussani (from the floor)
I think we are just focusing on technology, but we are not addicted to that, we are addicted to people, to a desire to keep in touch with as many people as possible.
Stefana Broadbent
It really depends also on the nature of the communication channel (asynchronous, synchronous), and the nature of the communication itself (fully engaged vs. monosyllabic).
Fred Mast (answering another question about multi-tasking)
One thing we are seeing is that people fill empty time slots (e.g. driving home) with more and more activities.
Stefana Broadbent
How much are actually people "routinizing" their activities in a way that does not require them to devote all their attention to the task at hand?
Maybe what others perceive as multi-task is actually something we do without thinking.
Nada Kakabadse
Yes, but it also really depends on the type of task: certain ones are simple to automate through. The problem is when we apply the same auto-pilot mindset to task that do require attention, like walking or driving, this is when things can go bad, we walk into doors, we have car accidents.
Stefana Broadbent
For me an element that's missing here is social etiquette. How fast should you answer an email? What is considered acceptable? The point is that the real pressure comes from this cultural understanding of what is considered to be socially polite/acceptable.
Matthias Luefkens
How do you unplug?
Stefana Broadbent
I don't, that's the way I lose my social intelligence.
Fred Mast
Why should we? What we've heard is that you can be addicted and be happy at the same time.
Nada Kakabadse
There is always a point where too much is too much, people saturate. We need to perceive that we control our lives.
Stefana Broadbent
Sorry but we are really talking about an artificial problem. Most people get 5 emails a day, and they are so happy when they do! This is a real problem only to a microscopic part of the population.
People want to communicate more, not less!

LIFT 07, day one.

2007-02-08T23:45:00.000+01:00

Here are my semi-rough notes from day one of LIFT 07.
Please notice: what follows is not necessarily what people literally said, but what I (think I) understood from the talks I attended.

Keynote
Florence Devouard, Wikimedia Foundation

A few of the principles behind Wikipedia.
Nurturing a critical mind: informing rather than manipulating.
Empowering individuals ("soft-fix it" approach), make them feel they all own the final outcome.
A-priori trust as the basis of the whole architecture.

Open-ended play
Sampo Karjalainen, Habbo

Most users called Habbo a game but it's not, it's an open environment.
Average age is 14, target is 16-18, with a balanced male/female presence.
People mainly come to meet others and chat.
There are places designed by us and others designed and built by users.
What is that keeps users come back? The answer can be found in user-created rooms, which are then filled with virtual goods (payed with real money).
Certain items are rare, we sell them only for a short time, so people collect them and sometimes even store them in special storage rooms, or they sell them at a premium later on.
There are kissing rooms, armies, mafias: users decide rules for simple games and people can join them.
There are activities that are fully unsupported but people still do them (for example they pretend to be horses and other people feed them, crazy stuff!).
People can also create their own "page" via Habbo-provided tools, and write on it about themselves etc.
Why do people come to Habbo?
We think that the force at work here is play, an opportunity for teen-agers who are not kids anymore to keep doing things that might be considered to be childish (and this obviously applies also to adults).
This "open space" fosters people's own desires and inclinations.
How to create such a space?
First you need to provide something to play with, simple components that can be easily combined.
Second you need intuitive, easy-reach interaction: simple ways to get things done, a user interface that does not alter the flow of play.
Third set-up a mood for play, a feeling of being allowed to experiment and not being judged.
Fourth allow users to set their own goals for what they want to do and how.
Fifth define and test certain uses case, things you expect to see.

(In other words "create just enough structure to get people engaged, then free them up to do what they want")

Contemporary Space(s)
Christoph Guignard

In the distant past everything built was referred to man and his relationship to the cosmos.
Today's (western) culture has been distancing itself from the universe in which mankind lives.
Today's architecture is "ex-dimensional", in the sense that it reflects culture and not physical space, for example in the way digital spaces are increasingly influencing what we build and vice versa (shows images of Second Life, Dubai, indoor skiing slopes etc.).
Le Corbusier famous saying about "architecture being the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light" is now questioned in terms of the nature of that very light: what light are we talking about today? Not even necessarily the light we can physiologically see.

Towards a society of cyborgs?
Daniela Cerqui, University of Lausanne

Interested in technology implants and working on it for the last 12 years, applying an "anthropological" approach to studying people who have been experimenting with implants, like Kevin Warwick (shows photos from the operation to implant the chip into Warwick's arm - gah!).
Warwick over time developed an ability to interpret the signals coming from his median nerve and use them to move things or "feel" them using technological peripherals, for example he was able to control a robotic hand using only signals from his brain.
We think this is "weird" but technology itself is considered a value today, and our sense of what is "normal" is constantly shifting these days.
Human beings are flexible, we get used to anything, thus also the definition of humankind is dynamic. To what extent? Not sure.
People want to establish boundaries between medical applications and those that challenge the nature of humankind, but that line is simply impossible to draw.
Warwick's implants are just one more step on the way to the information society, and whether we like it or not we are all on the same (his) path: being normal today is being "connected".
What we are fighting against is our human nature itself.

Literacy, communication and design
Jan Chipchase, Nokia

This is about the more exploratory research work we've been doing at Nokia.
A few years ago we were asked: what would it take to design a phone for illiterate people?
Assumption: pretty much anyone can appreciate the ability to transcend space and time in a personal and convenient manner.
Assumption: it's better to solve the root of a problem (illiteracy) than the manifestation of that problem.
You can also think about illiteracy simply as "not speaking" the local language.
The term "illiteracy" usually only defines the lack of "structured learning" (the stuff you learn in school), but there's so much more about knowledge than textual literacy, for example knowing someone who can help me solve a problem.
The easy fix for mobile phones: an iconic interface - but icons still need to be learned, and to do that on your own you probably need text (to explain), so this is not THE solution.
Let's look for a smarter question: is textual illiteracy a real barrier to device competency?
Armed with these questions Nokia set out to run ethnographic research to find possible answers in India, China, Nepal, Uganda...
How do people in these countries approach phonebooks? How do they learn to use other high-tech objects like TVs? How do they keep track of your friends' phone numbers? How do they know if you've been payed enough if you can't read numbers?
People actually do this everyday, so how to research this in a way that respects people's cultures and ethics?
What did we learn?
Anything is possible, it just takes a lot longer (filling a form can take a full day - to get somebody's help) and it's not "practical".
Learning is difficult in many of these environments, where experiences are inconsistent and trial and error can be dangerous to somebody's social stature (minor personal shame) or even imply higher risks (money, or even life-threatening consequences).
How to encourage exploration by allowing people to easily recover from errors?
Another aspect that's key is delegation, what are things and tasks that we can delegate to technology rather than to people?
Illiterate users are actually smarter than most when it comes to delegate, because it's part of their social support system(s).

(Great talk but a bit short on conclusions. Not enough time!)

Fast, cheap and out of control
Nathan Eagle, MIT

I live in Kenia, and Africa is the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world (more than 7 mil mobile phone subscribers).
The idea of the mobile phone itself though it's different: you can get one soldered up for you on the street for 15 USD (out of pieces of older ones).
People use mobile phones to decide where they can sell their goods (i.e. milk) at a higher price, and seeing this we decided to start EPROM - Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles.
EPROM has various components.
First is education: helping kids and students to build mobile-based services (e.g. SMS-based services)
Second is entrepreneurship: teach how to develop mobile applications.
Third is research: predict what its user is going to do next by continually learning about its location, communication, and context.
Being in these kinds of contexts lets you see what incredible opportunities mobile phones open in developing countries, they totally replace what computers tend to do in the western world.
To get a sense for these opportunities you have to be where the action is, they won't come if you're sitting somewhere in Switzerland.

Sensor Networks: from the lab to the supermarket?
Jacques Panchard, EPFL

We are entering an age of pervasive computing, with sensors embedded into all and every object.
Networks of these sensors could be used to transmit aggregated information about environmental conditions and be used to detect floods, earthquakes etc.
Scenarios described today for wireless sensor networks are very optimistic (low cost, ease of installation, reliability etc.) but the reality is still quite different (size of sensors still quite large, cost quite high, lots of problems with interferences etc.).
Current applications mostly around monitoring (industrial, private, environmental), home automation and automated meter reading.
Future applications: vehicular communication, body-area networks (medical, fashion, sports), arts/entertainment.
Still missing: a real mass-market application.
Who are the actors? OEMs, system integrators, application providers.

When 1st Life meets 2nd Life
Julian Bleecker, University of Southern California

We know 1st and 2nd life are different, but how?
First of all material contingencies: every single bit of digital matter implies physical matter to support it.
Secondly our expectations for 2nd life come from our 1st one, that is indeed situated in a physical context.
This implies a debt, a debt of human resources, a debt of expended energy (the infamous calculation that one avatar consumes almost as much energy as a real human being), a debt to the sedentary body sitting in front of a computer screen.
In 1st life you can't reboot the computer when it crashes, in 1st life there's only one body, in 1st life there's only one world to inhabit, and that world has innumerable crisis.
So now what? Does it make sense to find bridges and try to merge the best characteristics of both worlds? Is there a way to shape 2nd life worlds taking the material contingencies of 1st life into account?
That answer might be play.
Start by creating legible, playful reminders of the materiality of 1st life in 2nd life: motion, time, distance.
Are there examples of this already available?
The first one is the Wii, which brings motion to an unprecedented level of tangibility.
The second one is Animal Crossing, which works in real time.
The third one is Teku Teku Angel, which basically combines a tamagotchy with a pedometer, with your walking becoming a structural part of the gaming experience.

The Luminous Bath: our new volumetric medium
Ben Cerveny

I will be taking a journey into abstraction here.
What does it mean to be in a world of pervasive computing?
We have been living in a world of meaning over-imposed on top of objects ever since humans beings and their cultures have been around.
The first metaphor that comes to mind is the spilling out of information onto physical space, and I refer to this as "the luminous path".
Fluidity of attention is the result of this spill of attention-demanding technology increasingly surrounding us, and suspension of belief will be partially required to embrace this change.
As we start to be surrounded by shards of experiences captured by others, there's also a process of self-organization at work ("memotaxis", from chemistry's "chemotaxis") enabled by metadata.
These aggregate morphologies (mash-ups) give sense and shape to data-sets, and make them intelligible.
Aggregate morphologies attach themselves to places and objects, to people, just as coral growing on existing rocks, in a process of accretion.
What happens to people immersed in the luminous path?
People start to have passive opportunities to signal status and position to the collective.
Another characteristic of the luminous path is bioluminescence: the idea that the path in the fluid, the trace of perception, has a history that's visible, a way to map and visualize the information over time.
What to do with the luminous path?
One opportunity is decanting, distilling information into something less fluid and thus more "actionable". Another is crystallization, freezing the state of a system for the time that is useful and then letting it become fluid again. A third one is acculturation, cultural practices emerging from being immersed in the fluid.

(Ben's talk was so wonderfully meta I just could not digest it while taking notes at the same time. That's probably the reason why all of the above probably does not reflect at all what he actually said.)

Everyware: Further down the rabbit hole
Adam Greenfield

We've heard a lot about ubiquitous computing today, but what does that actually mean to all of us today, and in the future?
Everyware is "information processing invested in the objects and surfaces of the everyday", a notion derived from Mark Weiser's own: "Computing invisible, but in the woodwork everywhere around us" - embedded, wireless, imperceptible, multiple, post-GUI.
Today information processing shows up in new places and takes on new tasks (shows iPhone, Nike+ pedometer, NFC-enabled Nokia mobile phone).
The people developing the emergent "internet of things" don't seem to be aware of the impact of the decisions they are taking.
Who controls the innumerable data streams produced by this class of systems, one that tends to colonize everyday life? The risk is finding ourselves in Panopticon-like scenarios. This is the dark side of everyware.
Luckily there are positive sides too, one being the opportunity for technology to dissolve into behavior, becoming transparent to our needs and their physical manifestations.
Where do we stand in all of this?
First of all in the last year or so many of the concepts and prototypes I had been showing have started to become products, standards (like iPV6) and infrastructure are already in place, and adoption of embryonal everyware also appears to be unproblematic. This is all pointing to the fact that we are already effectively living in an incarnation of Weiser's vision.
We have to take these aspects into serious consideration, identifying principles for designing these systems and the nature of our interactions with them in a way that is respectful of people's values and beliefs.
It's time to take everyware seriously.

(Adam was hands-down the speaker who best mastered the stage today. Great delivery and confidence.)

Putting play in video playback.

2007-02-02T22:00:00.000+01:00

On a recent business trip I put the latest version of Skype and its video capabilities to the test.
The missing enabler, a webcam, had been previously missing from my standard package of techno-geekery paraphernalia, but this time I found it conveniently embedded in the upper frame of my MacBook Pro screen.

Imagine the context.
A nondescript hotel room as the backdrop, a camera lens with a field of view just large enough to show my unattractive face and, well, a typical husband-wife conversation about the way the day went.
I'll quickly come to the crux of the matter: after a (short) bit the video channel lost its initial appeal.
Sure, Valeria could see me from across the globe, and that alone was something that initially felt almost magic, but I soon found my fingers itchy for the text-based channel.
I realized I was missing, brace yourself, silly emoticons.
Yes, those cute-ish smiling/crying/winking/puking icons that populate chat sessions and add a sense of emotional engagement to the often semi-monosyllabic conversations typical of the medium.
Valeria and I have over time developed somewhat of a lexicon based on the silly things, and I find myself looking forward to the ways in which she'll creatively combine a handful of them in funny ways to get me to smile.
I can tell her mood in a few seconds by the way she peppers the conversation with teddy bears or angry little faces... come to think about it I could probably tell if it is really her, even if she did not write a single word.
You could arguably say that the inherent limitations and the very nature of the medium have pushed us to look for "other" ways to convey our feelings, and that the secondary channel has become as appealing as the supposedly primary one.
Emoticons have over time become for us the fun and emotional side of the word-exchanging experience.

Back to video and to my unattractive face.
Where was the opportunity here to make the experience just as enjoyable?
Well, for starters I quickly found myself playing the human smiley: I made funny faces. Then objects around me became excuses to liven things up a bit, with tea cups and hotel pens all playing a starring role in the conversation.
Even the hardly-ever-noticed hotel stationary ended up enabling impromptu funny comments to appear, silent movie style.
If all of this sounds a tad silly, well, it should, because that's often the way conversations with loved ones go: it's not (just) the hard facts that matter, it's the warmth and affection conveyed that do.
It's the feeling that the other party is not just "checking in", but it's enjoying the exchange, putting all of him/herself into it and adding a bit of creativity to the mix.
So here's a hint to Skype and to the rest of the IP-based audio-video-communication developing community: go beyond the purely utilitarian needs of your customer base.
What you are doing right now works to get communication efficiently from screen to screen, but leaves unexplored paths that lead straight to your customers' creativity (and ultimately to their hearts).
And no, I'm not just talking about 3D talking heads avatars, ringtones and that kind of path, that's the wide and easy path.
I am talking about the narrow one.

All of the above takes me straight to considerations around current media production-consumption paradigms (and continuums).
If you've been living on this planet in the last few months and you happen to be one of Time's persons of the year 2006 you will have probably heard about a video-sharing service called YouTube.
Someone calls the mostly crazy assemblage of crappy greatness found on it "user generated content", and everyone is keen these days to understand how to turn the madness into a business model, with Goggle actually having bet quite a bit of money on that fact that it will indeed solve the riddle.
YouTube is a disruptive service in the sense that it enables anyone with a video-capturing device and something to say (or not) to reach an audience previously accessible only by multi-national broadcasters.
Witness the rise to fame of virtual Aidorus like Lonelygirl15.

What YouTube has not changed yet though is the relationship between the human being watching a video snippet and that snippet itself.
In other words there's a lot for people to do before and after watching crazy people risking their lives playing human yo-yo across a field, but hardly anything that can be done during video playback.
And here lies the catch.
On YouTube the content and the substrate that "holds" and controls the content share the same nature, that substrate currently being Adobe Flash (I know deep down the real substrate is actually bits, but I'm talking phenotype, not genotype here).
This is a subtle but potentially intriguing aspect to focus on.
Historically fruition of video content has always implied the presence of a container, usually a hardware peripheral, playing the intermediary role between the viewer and the "black-boxed" video.
This mental model of sorts still stands today: there's always a frame around the video with controls to make it play, pause, stop rewind. Content and container.
We stick to this paradigm because it's one we know very well, but just like all paradigms it also somewhat prevents us from questioning limitations that are no longer really there.
On YouTube the frame around the video is made of the same stuff of the video, it's just made to look differently.
You could simplify things a bit and sum them up by stating that what you are watching on YouTube feels like the good ol' video content we're all so used to, but it is not really.
It's a potentially malleable medium in itself.
The content and the substrate share the same nature, and this could in the future open ample opportunities for interactivity with the video stream itself, even as it's been streamed.
In other words there's nothing that conceptually prevents (technically it's still a different matter) someone from pausing a Flash-based video, and then record over it a voice note only his/her friends will be able to hear.
If this sounds strangely familiar it's because it's conceptually identical to what you can already do today when leaving comments on somedbody's photos on Flickr.
Flash magic at work again.

Still with me? Good.
Because I'd like to take you where I really wanted to go in the first place: video production/fruition and networked mobile devices.
The reason why is quite simple.
It is often said that mobile phones and the like are first and foremost communication tools, and that any feature that finds its way into these devices should take that strongly into account.
When 3G and its broadband-like wireless pipe enabled videos to be exchanged across the ether the immediate consequence was video-calling.
The reasons why video-calling tanked on the market are many, and if you ask me kindly I could even write about it a bit.
Suffice to say for the time being that in the end the problem has been confusing video-enhanced communication with video-calling.
Why couldn't video be a substrate for communication, and not just something to look at when bored for a few minutes?
What lies beyond the "record/watch this then share/send it" current paradigm?

Seeing things from this angle opens interesting opportunities.
Why couldn't you video-call someone and show something else rather than your face, or your surroundings?
Again I am not talking about avatars and the like, I am talking about bits that might be stored in the memory of your device of choice: photos, videos, music.
De-coupling video and audio to provide you with an instant soundtrack, or talking over a slide-show of your own photos, or letting movie snippets enhance the conversation.
Say it again Sam.
Using video communication not just to get a message across, but as as a vehicle for self-expression, to play with the medium and have fun.

Needless to say this scenario also opens new paths to explore in terms of interaction.
I am sure you got there already by now, but not only video content and its container share the same nature, also the conceptual separation between the container and its own container, the OS, is somewhat artificial, with many handsets on the market today already supporting Adobe Flash as a presentation layer for various areas of the embedded user interface.
Add extensive use of metadata to the mix and these blurring boundaries could mean using media as a structural constituent of the interaction paradigm.

Take a look at this video of my friends.
It's my new phonebook.

Competition: interaction with virtual assistants.

2007-02-01T20:00:00.000+01:00

Leandro Agrò, the mind behind Idearium and Frontiers of Interaction, has kindly invited me to be one of the judges for a competition aimed at improving interactions with virtual assistants.

The competition is sponsored by Kallideas, and you can dowload all the necessary details here (PDF, 120 KB).

"Nowadays Virtual Assistants offer online users entertaining, yet competent professional services.
Natural language interaction, online translation, 3D-avatar technology and artificial intelligence create a powerful instrument to enable innovative services that are likely to find a wide acceptance among users.
However the simplicity of interaction, the possibility of seamless integration into existing platforms and workflows, the very human-like nature of the avatar, as well as the use of natural language to navigate within the application is an extremely remarkable challenge.
The development of intelligent persona systems using innovative application designs often leads to new technological problems. The more the advisor looks and behaves human-like, the more users will expect in terms of flexibility, knowledge and intelligence.
Increasing the intelligence of a system usually involves adding knowledge sources and processes to handle them. The result is another challenge: ways to improve the filtering, indexing, retrieval and presentation of relevant external knowledge, for example documents from websites, as a natural continuation of the dialogue.

The goal of this design competition is to select a human-like interaction concept that better address the challenges mentioned above.
The winning design will be presented at Frontiers of Interaction III (Milan, 28 June 2007) and at CHI Italy (Padua, 30 June 2007)."

iPhonia.

2007-01-10T22:00:00.000+01:00

Reserved, ecstatic, convergent, dubious, maternal, conversational, unfazed, obliged, delirious, historic, hands-on (hi-hi-fi proto), hands-on (lo-lo-fi proto), significant, QWERTYless, un-touchy-un-feely, killer-apped, totally unrelated but oddly fitting, far from over.

Manifestos for/from the (near) future.

2006-12-21T23:00:00.000+01:00

I just received from the future the January 07 issue of Icon magazine.
No, unfortunately it does not include racetrack results of any kind, but on page 21 Justin McGuirk writes what could very well be my manifesto for the upcoming new year:

"There's nothing intrinsically interesting about technology.
It's only as interesting as what you can do with it.
You can create some piece of 'convergent' nonsense - a printer that plays music and polishes your shoes - or you can project an image of a tree in a public square, make the leaves fall as people walk past and have them swirl on the ground as pedestrians walk through them.
The first is onanism, the second is poetry.

The designers collected together in our feature on interaction design (Simon Heijdens, Moritz Waldemeyer, Greyworld, Loop and Troika) use increasingly accessible forms of technology to make surprising, delightful things rather than strictly 'useful' ones (isn't it useful to make someone feel better on the way home from work?).
Now that, at least in the west, our design needs are largely met, the designer's role can become that of the humanist - or even magician.
Our electronic devices can be so much more intuitive, our public spaces so much more magical.
Advocates of a stricter notion of design may accuse the practices published here of playing around on the margins of the discipline.
To them I would say that perhaps what we need - as a society - is less design and more magic."

Catching up.

2006-11-01T20:30:00.000+01:00

People who roam these pages every now and then know that this weblog has often seen long pauses between updates (not counting del.icio.us links for those that subscribe to freegorifero's RSS feed).
At times the reason has been quite simple: I had nothing to say.
In that case I had long ago decided to just remain silent: there are so many other voices out there that are more original or provide a clearer outlook onto the future that there's no need for my noise in the presence of such strong signals anyway.
Other times the reason for my silence has been different but still quite simple: too much happening in my life.
The last few months have been mostly about the latter.

In a pinch...
I joined frog design Milano, where I'll be playing associate creative director.
I am honored and humbled to be part of the frog family, along with people that have been on my inspiration list as long as I've had one.
After a fun and fruitful year mostly spent teaching at Interaction Ivrea it also feels great to be back in a client-facing role, getting my hands dirty.
I am counting on not loosing contact with students though, I enjoy sharing knowledge too much, so in the future I'll keep collaborating on and off with various design schools.
In the last months I've also been contributing to Convivio's blog. Convivio is a EU-sponsored network of excellence focused on the human-centered design of interactive technologies, and I've just started a series of interviews with leading voices from the field of design-at-large. It's nice to be "on the other side of the table", asking some of the questions I've seldom been asked myself.

Final note, personal one, most important one.
In a few months Valeria and I will be having a baby.
We're elated, to the point that at times we both feel we'd better sit down, the world spinning too fast all around us.
On the way back from our holidays in Sicily this summer I suddenly realized that this is not unlike starting a journey, one we'll truly never come back home from.
Re-reading both sentences above also makes me think how useless words are in case of life-changing events like this one.

Have a feeling all of the above is not going to do wonders for the time I'll have to devote to these pages though.
I guess I'll just keep counting on your patience.

Salone 2006 tales (a slight reprise).

2006-08-03T08:57:00.000+02:00

A few months ago I wrote a quite caustic commentary on an object I had seen during the Salone del Mobile di Milano, a multi-purpuse wooden box called the Crate, produced by British firm Established & Sons and designed by Jasper Morrison.
To my surprise Jasper recently got in touch, and we exchanged a few emails, trying to clarify our differing points of view.

I have to say upfront that my original post was not typical of freegorifero, as I personally don't believe that to prove the sharpness of one's arguments those critiqued should be left cut and bleeding.
In this case though, as I tried to explain to Jasper himself, the edginess of my words was probably caused by the passion I've always had for his work and overall approach to design, with similarly strong feelings elicited by a product which I felt did little justice to the respect and admiration I have for him.
Our conversation did not really change my initial ideas, but it did pleasantly confirm that Morrison's beautifully simple, elegant objects actually reflect the values of their creator.
I don't know many people who would have tackled some unknown guy's critical words with his openness and egolessness.

I thus thought it would only be fair to let you know his point of view in addition to mine, so that you can form your own opinion.
With Jasper's permission I've thus posted below excerpts from our email exchange.
Enjoy.

FS
"While I share your interest and enthusiasm for 'super-normal' objects, I also think that anything brought into the world should make a 'just noticeable difference', it should have a 'soul'... both aspects I still fail to perceive, I am sorry to say, in the Crate.
What I see instead is a branding exercise that almost seems to be mocking the 'affordable design for the masses' ethos, and uses a faithful copy of a 'found object' as its conduit.
Hence the irritation, first and foremost at the marketing hoopla surrounding the product.

I also very well know that it can be deceiving to judge a designer's real involvement with a product from the product itself, and that sometimes the industry-at-large has its curious ways of twisting good intentions, but you being who you are, one of the world's best-known product designers, brought me to assume that the control you have had over the product has been substantial.
Thus the (harsh) criticism, which I hope hasn't overly offended you, honestly.
Needless to say this is also simply my opinion, not an absolute truth, and I would love to hear your point of view."

JM
"Thanks for your explanation, it's very interesting to have this direct opinion from someone who cares about 'how things are'.
I see you are upset by what you percieve as a cynical marketing exercise, but let me explain.
First of all no one in a hundred years is going to get rich making wooden boxes and selling them as bedside tables.
It was never the goal to exploit consumers, but there was more than one reason for doing it, and I hope I can convince you that it's a worthwhile project, even if you don't like it.

Reason 1
I think that design has become a serious source of visual pollution.
Designers are being fooled into 'expressing themselves' visually by an image hungry media, and have forgotten their responsibilities as guardians of the everyday man made environment.

Conclusion: too much personal expressive ego going on, find other ways to arrive at solutions.

Reason 2
Apart from copying someone else's work, I don't think there are any limits on how a designer achieves a design, so long as it is a useful offering and represents good value/quality and doesn't pollute.
I did have the original crate (and still do) beside my bed for 3 years, and it took me those three years to reach the conclusion that offering it as a design was a good thing to do, because it works so well, and because I couldn't get any more boxes from the wine shop.
I don't claim any ownership of the use of wooden boxes beside beds, it's just an act of trying to be helpful, so if anyone can find a wine shop giving away boxes then go ahead and use it.
If not and you can afford �95, and want one, it's available.

Conclusion: If a designer comes across something useful, it's part of his job to make it available.

Finally if there is a cynical side to the project, it's aimed at manufacturers who would produce anything with a name attached to it.
There's no debate in our profession and almost no questioning of the worth of producing so much stuff.
I am annoyed about what my profession is becoming: a cheap-trick supplier to the media, and this project and others, including the Super Normal exhibition which will be shown in Milan next April, are attempts to balance the situation."

FS
"May I also ask you why you decided to be quite literal in the translation of the box from 'found object' to product?
I appreciate your reasons, but I have to admit struggling with the idea of the designer as a 'facilitator' of sorts, and always preferred to think in terms of a 'catalyst', someone who can act as the 'secret ingredient' to accelerate processes and make them go the next step (this not at all implying for the designer to be THE ingredient, just one of them).
In this case did you consider at all ways to improve the original wooden box, and if you decided not to, may I ask why?"

JM
"I suppose it seemed wrong for me to 'correct' something which worked well already.
In fact for production reason we did upgrade the joints a bit and changed the wood from ordinary pine wood (which wasn't possible to find in the same form as on the original crate) to douglas fir.
A very long time ago (1988 or so) I bought some forged steel coat hooks and screwed them on to a piece of wood, replicating a home made solution to hanging up coats. The argument then was the same as now, it's a charming solution to a problem which works well and can't be found in shops.
I like these kind of eveyday solutions which anyone could invent.
For me doing things which are obvious is more interesting than trying to do things which are obscure and overly personal in expression.
That's all I can say on the subject, but of course you reserve your right to think it's a bad project, no problem, you are not the only one!"

Well, I may still think it's a project I am not particularly keen on, but what I've seen of the man definitely matches, if not overshadows, the outstanding quality of the designer.
Not a small feat, at least in my book.