gyulasimonyi.com

prison break for real

2010-02-11T17:30:00.014Z

Photo: A4 size paper asking citizens' assistance in catching a prison escapee, at a highway McDonald's somewhere between Boston and New York.

Seriously. In 2010, at least put a QR code, so people can load this info to their smart phone.

efforts to regain trust

2010-02-04T15:12:00.000Z

The child abuse scandals ridden church in Ireland now begins events in the church with drawing churchgoers' attention to the child protection policy, and the location where it hangs on the cold walls, near the entrance.

While the introduction of such policies and establishment of complaint hotlines might work in rebuilding people's trust, and even preventing child abuse from happening, it certainly leaves intact the systemic, institutional reasons behind the 'eventful' past of priests in Ireland.

illegal eligibility

2010-01-30T20:36:00.001Z

The dynamics of...

Provision of trust and a body modified by (sometimes illegal) substance, in return for anonymity and money, for the purpose of studies, clinical testing of drugs, etc.

Photos: ads from the Voice (NYC weekly free magazine)

alternative currency for charity

2010-01-25T14:38:00.001Z

Photo: bus ticket collecting box in a Dublin elementary school.

Buses in Dublin take only coins, and give no change. However, if you have to overpay, the difference is printed in your ticket as a 'refund', that you can claim at the Dublin Bus office.

Since most people don't make the way to this office for the 10-20-30.. cents per ticket, they are more willing to drop it in a charity box than real Euros. Actually such 'charity collection' can be also perceived as a service provided, people happily unload their tickets from their wallets.

As an unintended side effect, this public transport fare payment system fosters the giving mood in the city. Wonder if it was foreseen at design.

enraging waste of keyboard real estate

2010-01-21T14:20:00.034Z

Most people never/very rarely use CapsLock. Some people really hate it even. A few will even go as far as self-handedly customizing their keyboards.

Interesting to see how some features from the birth of computing still haunt around and weather the lightning fast evolution of technology. Think slide presentations for example.

rule #17: enjoy the little things

2010-01-17T14:16:00.002Z

luggage compartment on the heathrow express on an early january day.

the war against/for waste

2009-12-29T15:56:00.000Z

This waste bin on the Sandymount DART station in Dublin promises that 70% of its content will be recycled. Nice to see, but far from a perfect solution.

From the marriage of increasing primary resource scarcity, hiking landfill prices, growing social awareness on one side and cheap-accurate-invisible object tracking on the other, hopefully soon we will see a transparent and precise, granular yet simple solution.

Today you pay for waste disposal at home, by the bin. Not when using public bins.
Imagine:
- paying for throwing away anything, anywhere.
- different micro-payments for each piece of waste at disposal, based on recycling-ease, material-value, total-volume-per-person-per-month, sorting.
- paying the harshest price (unsorted, etc..) up front at purchase for everything, to then get refunded for the difference (if any) at disposal.

Such system could encourage:
- making the effort to sort over not-sorting,
- buying (therefore also producing) packaging-light products, favoring easily recyclable materials, methods,
- fixing, reusing goods over throwaway culture,
- growing local, composting-biodegrading.

transparency, using social media

2009-12-15T10:04:00.030Z

Businesses use the web and social media for communicating with customers in colorful ways, and with various purposes.

A particular purpose of such communication can be transparency, revealing section(s) of the background process(es), that usually remains hidden.

Some examples that I saw recently:
- Angavallen, a Swedish eco farm shows its pigs proudly on flickr
- Pastrami, a restaurant in Budapest offers a live webcam feed from their kitchen on their website.

Photo: extra attentiveness on Pastrami's website shows that parking is free, dogs are welcome and served with water, wifi is free, mobile chargers are on stock, there is place for changing diapers and of course there are child seat and toys available, and also that bike path leads to the restaurant.

tweeting in your sleep

2009-12-07T15:35:00.001Z

being off the grid.

for you:
how many hours a day? days a year?

for you:
not tweeting/blogging/chatting/following for some time by choice? versus deprived of connection and truly hard/impossible to reach due to circumstances?

sleep = off the grid. now maybe.

but how long before your unconscious will write posts and tweets, chats around while you are asleep?

what risks/opportunities are involved in opting-in to a true 24/7/365 connectedness? what changes will the connected unconscious bring to social concepts such as political transparency, corruption, crime, trust, faith, business, etc.

photo: long exposure experiment on a midnight rooftop, Hyderabad, India

connected: adam wilson tweets using brainwaves.

body embedded technology

2009-12-04T13:40:00.005Z

photo: basic words in kyrgyz, written up on a napkin, kept in back pocket for a trip.

language skills are essential. fluent english is a must, mandarin, spanish, japanese, german and others come as a plus.

how long until good enough autotranslation is integrated real time into any conversation via voice recognition, text-to-speech technologies (in the cloud) and invisible devices?

when can we expect such solutions becoming mainstream enough to render language skills as something nice-to-have, as opposed to must-have today?

having a voice recognizing device, connected to the cloud, invisibly and constantly available for you, also enable possible side effects, such as:
- all your conversations recorded for you in the cloud
- tweets, posts, status updates are born through dictation on-the-go
- you can ask your questions any time in any language, you will get the answer from Google instantly, read out for you, in your language. imagine the perspective for illiterate people.

immigrant population patterns

2009-11-29T11:15:00.084Z

Photos from Lithuanica, the store for Lithuanian and some Polish products (mainly food), in a Dublin city center mall.

The patterns of service and societal layers crystallizing around sizable immigrant populations.

The size of an immigrant population as a factor in:
- how actively will its members look for, socialize with each other,
- how they are regarded by locals (on the scale from a positive color, exotic quests, towards a threatening intruder),
- how developed and concentrated are the service institutions (appearance of national stores, services like barbers and cleaners, restaurants, and the unofficial labels such as lebanese street, china town, arab district, etc).

micro regulation

2009-11-25T11:15:00.033Z

This traffic regulation sign near a one-off street music event (Copenhagen), is very narrow in scope. Limits only one kind of behavior, only on one street section, and only for 10 hours on one given date.

How long until such micro regulations will be factored in real time for turn-by-turn navigations, such as Google's for Android phones?

low range urban status message

2009-11-22T11:15:00.004Z

Looking for open signals in range on a Copenhagen corner. Using your wifi network name as a messaging platform.

chatting with random strangers

2009-11-18T13:59:00.000Z

just tried omegle.com, a simple site that randomly couples you up with a stranger for a chat.

here is their introduction:
"When you use Omegle, we pick another user at random and let you have a one-on-one chat with each other. Chats are completely anonymous, although there is nothing to stop you from revealing personal details if you would like."

you can see snippets from the meaningful conversation I managed to have with a 16 year old French girl (at least the stranger claimed) during my first omegle chat.

would be interesting to know in what moods, situations people click on "start a chat" on omegle. what are they looking for, and if they get it. are there people/organizations that use the service for some professional use cases like research, marketing, etc.

go, have a random chat now :)

the next 1 billion business. you mean dollars or customers?

2009-11-14T19:31:00.004Z

So what's up with Nokia? The brand that is equivalent with mobile communication in many locales, is getting less attention recently. While the exciting and loud battle for affluent early adopters continues in the smartphone segment between Apple, RIM and Google, the finnish giant, Nokia is actively pushing the boundaries of connecting people on the other end of the target spectrum.

With its recent product launches (Nokia 1280 and its buddies), and its software solutions (Nokia Money rolling out in 2010, or Nokia Life Tools), Nokia a in the game of pushing TCO (total cost of ownership) down drastically, allowing inclusion into mobile communication for many millions of new customers from the bottom billion.

With 22(!) days of standby battery time, an FM radio and a flashlight, the dust and scratch resistant Nokia 1280 is designed with keeping shared usage and energy poverty in mind. The price? EUR 20 excluding taxes.

Priced at 20 Euros, would the iPhone become competitive/interesting for a sheep herder on the Kyrgyz jailoos? For a two-wheel mango merchant on a Hyderabad bazaar? For a roadside fried-corn vendor in Arusha, Tanzania?

recruiting after a crisis

2009-11-07T15:14:00.037Z

Once hiring restarts after the current recession, recruiters will have a whole new set of great questions to ask on interviews:
- What did you do when you lost your previous job? What did you do 3 days, 6 days, 2 weeks later?
- How did you feel about the situation? What did you learn from it?
- How do you feel about this pause in your career now, looking back? Is it more like a surprise gift from life, or a torture, a horrid nightmare? What where the good and bad things about it?

As we all know, people who are capable of success, do not grief failure, but learn from it, quickly spot the new opportunities and move on.

In a post-crisis world, it is easy to spot such people, if you are after them.

Future Vision 2019

2009-11-04T10:47:00.007Z

Microsoft Office Labs is the software giant's think tank, that looks far ahead (well, 5-10 years) into the future, and envisions technologies that will penetrate our everyday lives.

This inspiring video below is about productivity in 2019. If you prefer MS SilverLight, be my guest.

Technology certainly has a lot of potential in areas like telepresence, blurring the differences between being physically and remotely present even further. Working from ~~home~~ wherever you are, especially in the knowledge intensive areas will be commonplace, reducing required office space and facilities as we know it. How will this exodus of professionals from the 'office' transform other spaces like cafes, restaurants, parks, homes, transport? How will our abilities and tolerance of keeping work and personal separated change?

It is nice to see how technology erodes the burdens to meaningful participation, community organization and how connecting and interacting with your data in the cloud (where else?) becomes seamless.

An even more interesting aspect to me, which is largely missing from MS' vision is how they see technology's role in dealing with the real challenges of 2019. How will technology impact the lives of the next billion people, or the bottom billion people (not the same, but definitely largely overlapping)? How will these gains in productivity contribute to a carbon neutral economy? If the technology enabled increase in productivity allowed us to do our job in 20 percent less time, will this result in a 20 percent shorter workweek?

Your comments welcome :)

recycle processes, education

2009-10-30T16:01:00.000Z

Photos: Recycling bay on Sandymount beach, Dublin, Ireland.

I bring my plastic and glass trash to this recycling bay every once in a while. It is ~450 meters from my home, and I usually walk/bike there. I haven't seen anyone else on foot/bike there ever, there are many people coming with cars though. Suboptimal.

I believe more people / everyone would recycle, if:
1) it was more convenient (e.g. closer to their home),
2) there was more clarity on 'what goes where', and also on 'what happens to it',
3) careful and thorough waste sorting was heavily incentivized.

re 1) the more people sort ALL their trash carefully, the more recycling bays are needed, therefore the average distance to the nearest bay drops drastically.

re 2) what is CLEAN? how clean is CLEAN? what is PLASTIC? there are hundreds of materials we call plastics. what is bottles and jars ONLY? what should I do with my broken clear glass mug? ... instructions must become more clear and exhaustive. also, understanding more in depth about what will happen to the collected trash, how it will be used, etc. can help more accurate sorting, and more broad adoption of the habit.

re 3) corporate income tax bands based on the recycled percentage of all their material output? residential waste collection fees drastically (50x) higher for unsorted trash? this could create a double tension that points in 100% sorting direction. of course, better tracking of a products lifecycle is needed to measure the performance of the system, and finding the weak links, bottlenecks on it for improvement.

Any best practices in your city?

reality search via cctv video

2009-10-27T14:32:00.051Z

CCTV cameras are everywhere.

In cities like London, in central areas basically every spot is recorded 24/7 from multiple angles. Citizens of such cities might easily end up on 1000+ recordings on an average day.

Imagine if all this material was crawled and indexed with geo data and time-stamps. Imagine improved resolutions and advanced face-recognition applied. Then search engines could serve video results for queries like:

"What did I do on the 22nd, January 2003?" (e.g. useful when writing my autobiography)
or
"What happened between 13:34 and 13:41, yesterday, on the corner of X and Y, in London?" (e.g. to find the numberplate of the car that hit me on my bike and left).

Any other use cases come to your mind?

Of course such service would be highly controversial and attacked like nothing before.

litter capacity planning

2009-10-22T00:39:00.004+01:00

Photos: Overflowing trash bins on Sandymount beach, Dublin, Ireland, on a wonderful, sunny weekend day.

On a nice day, more people will turn up in the park by the beach then on an average day. More people bring more trash, and will want to leave it here. On a sunny day, the bins on the beach will overflow, and the wind will carry litter everywhere. Suboptimal.

How does the planning process look like, and what are the formulas for determining (1) trash bin capacities, (2) types (for recycling), (3) bin designs that suit the context, (4) bin emptying frequency. Are there any processes, formulas?

And once a system is in place, how is it monitored, what are the metrics that describe their performance? Where are the sensors?

In a city where dropping litter and living surrounded by it is still widely accepted, the costs for careful planning and sophisticated systems are still too high.

winning people's trust

2009-10-16T13:34:00.001+01:00

Photos: European Parliament elections in Ireland, 2009 spring.

The various political marketing recipes on 'how to get this person to vote, and for me'. The need to build trust, and the methods to achieve that. A face, a name, a color.

The faces, that we use to read known and stranger others (at least the whole mammal world does that). The smiling but serious, the confident but caring, the leader who is also the 'hey, I am just one of you guys', the energetic but wrinkled. We are all looking for signs of wisdom, goodwill, trustworthiness. The thoughts, ideas, ideologies of the candidates are less important in this phase and channel, and are only represented by the party color of the name font/background.

In Ireland, these posters are printed on 8mm plastic boards to withstand the strong wind and frequent rain. They are attached to poles and fences in massive amounts (and then removed after the voting day). Imagine the resources invested, used, wasted. Consider the visual pollution the city has to endure for a lengthly period. The result?

The posters convey no information besides a face, name, color. But since all candidates have posters, noone dares to opt-out and have none. Would democracy, or the informedness of the public suffer, if posters were banned?

Why not force candidates to be creative, and force the public to think and actively inform itself by drastically limiting each candidate in their use of resources in a campaign. Banning the use of paper, plastic, metal, wood, etc. and limit the use of energy.

extended pride - obama in africa

2009-10-11T00:42:00.001+01:00

Obama was born is Hawaii, but his father was from Kenya. Yet, when Obama became president of the US, the whole African continent was celebrating him, as a son of their own.

These photos capture the pride and support for Obama in Tanzania, early in 2009.

nature-enabling urban design

2009-10-07T00:31:00.002+01:00

Photos: urban design that actively encourages nature's penetration of the city. taken in Dublin and Berlin.

effective message delivery

2009-10-03T00:38:00.063+01:00

Photo: danger sign on Sandymount beach, Dublin, Ireland

On this 2 km long beach stretch, there is this one single sign around the middle, near the shore. My estimate is that around 3% of all people visiting the beach (and going further in on the sand) meet this sign at all. And most won't read it anyway. The sign is not there to convey a warning (it could do a similarly efficient job at that just being buried under the sand). In a country, where the rule of law is strong, this sign is more designed for avoiding lawsuits then actually avoiding accidents.

Photos below: Sign by private people, enforced by none, obliged by some. VS. Rules set by authority, compliance 'incentivized'.

The situations where rules apply to you. With your knowledge, or without it. Even if you did all you could to find out about them, but failed. The situations where you comply, and where you don't (and count on getting away with it, or not even). The consequences, sometimes a fee penalty, sometimes a long scratch by a key on the car's door, a punctured tyre, or a broken side-mirror. Sometimes 'only' an angry, sad glance at you.

"fill this in and bring it back"

2009-09-29T00:53:00.011+01:00

Did you ever count, how many times a year you have to fill in your name, address, various identification numbers, payment details, etc.? Many online, many on paper.

Photo: border crossing paperwork in East Africa.

Arriving to Kenya, one form. Leaving Kenya for Tanzania, one form. Arriving to Tanzania 2 minutes later, one form. Leaving mainland Tanzania to arrive to Zanzibar, one form. Leaving Zanzibar for the mainland, one form. Leaving Tanzania, one form.

Some processes, services are below suboptimal. Loudly inefficient or dysfunctional even, and sometimes completely in lack of purpose.

2009. Within 2 weeks, touching only 2 countries, 6 forms altogether, nice colorful hard paper cards. All asking the same exact questions. Add all the check-ins to hotels, hostels, add all the ticket purchased in advance and on spot. Add the visas.

Self identification, information provision of the future? A method/technology/other that is lightweight and comfortable, quick and safe, globally standardized?

Or is this even the right vision?

Update: A related question is the safe and convenient storing of all the login/password data, pin codes, policy numbers, all the other data today.. and how it will look like in 10-20 years.