How To Break Anything

A quick thought on using Google Wave, related to the idea of an augmented reality "ghost game"

Kyle Studstill — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 21:34:01 +0000

As Google Wave evolves, there are sure to be a number of incredibly innovative uses that emerge. So far, I've jumped onto a small handful of brainstorming discussions.

In a recent interview with PSFK, Kevin Slavin (co-founder of the cross-media game-development group Area/Code) was talking about how they started to dive into augmented reality games back in 2005 when the technology first emerged. They started to develop a game where players would interact with ghosts rendered via augmented reality; this seemed like an excellent expression of what AR could do. What happened that some 20 or so of these same kind of 'ghost games' also popped up. As Slavin put it, "it's the fundamental expression of AR. It's as if that's all mobile AR wants to do: produce a game about ghosts."

Fast forward a few years and we're still trying to figure out what AR can do that will actually be tangibly useful (Slavin points to research demonstrating that the most consistent issue people have when using maps is the problem of how to initially orient yourself; he thinks this may be where AR may ultimately find a use).

Not that I think it'll take something like Wave as long to find any use; clearly Wave has already inspired a lot of ways to communicate and organize thoughts. My thought is just that perhaps the 'brainstorming/ideation board' seems like the 'ghost game' of Wave-powered thinking. Rudimentary and basic. Very interested to see what else evolves. What other interesting uses have you found for Wave thus far??

(come to think of it, I've found it very good for personal notes to self, also as a platform for half-baked ideas and relevant link inspiration. This used to happen through unshared Delicious links but Wave is a much smoother way to do this. I think Wave even suggests collaborators based on the content you post.)

How the specious randomness of coin-flipping reflects our irrational decision-making

Kyle Studstill — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:45:06 +0000

CoinFlipper by Nitpak Samsen

Nitpak 'dot' Samsen studies interaction design, with a number of his recent projects being featured in Japan's recent DesignTide 2009. These are worth viewing briefly in the video below; most of his experiments involve simple control mechanisms aimed at addressing issues of limited resources.

The Buttons from nitipak samsen on Vimeo.

One of Samsen's most involving projects has had him exploring the nature of randomness, meticulously recording the effects of different conditions on on a flipped coin in an attempt to build the perfect coin-flipping device.

Coin Flipper exp from nitipak samsen on Vimeo.

Samsen has compiled the below list of factors that affect that specious randomness we associate with coin-flipping, concluding that we can in fact control the result of something we tend to think of as random:

This is, of course, an incredibly complex and (at this point) completely inimitable system of factors. This points to the fact that while Samsen is correct about our potential for control, I wrote something quite related recently on our similar capacity to make decisions rationally (read: similarly impossible).

The short of it is that in a complex world full of systems ridiculously more complicated than flipping a coin, we develop heuristics, make assumptions, call determinable things random, and behave all-around irrationally.

(Incidentally, I do think that history illustrates our increasing capacity to work within increasingly complex systems. We're in the middle of a fortuitously ideal example of this, considering that our headlong dive into overwhelming amounts of information has resulted in all the beautifully evolving systems and visualizations attempting to organize it (see: Infosthetics, Flowing Data, plenty others). So when I say "we are [at this point] completely incapable of processing such intricate systems," I'm conceding that Samsen's assertion may simply be an optimistic look at what we're capable of, with which I am in agreeance.)

Furniture design aimed at reflecting our nostalgic youth

Kyle Studstill — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:10:10 +0000

From 83Design, a Japanese design group featured this year in DesignTide Tokyo 2009.

"Our design is not only stimulating, but somewhat nostalgic and heart warming."

Project: Nostalgia - what are some things you miss or remember? I'm collecting pieces of nostalgia here, anonymously. Would love to have a bit of yours.

"Ketchup was sold as medicine in the 1830's."

Kyle Studstill — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:07:48 +0000

It's terribly easy to call something snake oil years after the fact, when all the perceptions have changed.

Or to call the denial of basic rights an embarrasing social injustice years after the fact, when all the perceptions have changed.

Or to realize that all those people saying hard work is the only thing that pays off were right, years after the fact, when all the perceptions have changed.

Or that things like smoking, living wastefully, not recycling, etc. are all ridiculous notions, years after the fact, when all the perceptions have changed.

Or....?

What everyday attitude/perception/belief are you holding right now that is going to be radically different much sooner than you think?

[img via LEARN SOMETHING EVERY DAY]

Why it's impossible to be rational about anything: measuring decision-making factors' potential for rational analysis

Kyle Studstill — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:55:59 +0000

One of the problems with making decisions rationally is that it's conceptually impossible. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely highlights this by examining the decision-making process of someone faced with two coffee shops across the street from each other, one featuring handcrafted roasts and the other a standard chain where the coffee is $1.75 cheaper:

What you should do (if you wanted to be rational about it) is consider all of the things that you could buy with that $1.75, now as well as in the future, and decide to buy the expensive coffee only if the difference between the two coffees is more valuable than all of those other possibilities. But of course this computation would take hours, it is incredibly complex, and who even knows all the possible options to consider? [The Psychology of Money and Habits]

If you spend some time thinking on the factors that influence the direction of any decision, what you find is that every factor somewhere on a scale from high potential for rational analysis to low potential for rational analysis. Consider, for example, that a puppy's markings have a very low potential for rational analysis when deciding between one of two puppies to take home.

The problem is that even factors like price that fall relatively high compared to puppy spots are still far from being accurate tools for rational decision making. In this case it's because we can't help but make decisions based on context, relying on a memory that's spotty at best to judge the relative value of any monetary amount at any given time (see: How relativity affects every decision we make: an experiment in making $20K worth more than $20K). This is just one rule of human decision-making among a host of others.

Even if one were to accurately measure the various potentials for rational analysis of every factor at hand (impossible), one would then have to accurately compare factors within the overwhelming matrix of results (also impossible).

Our entire complex of heuristics and cognitive shortcuts exists entirely because being rational is simply far too difficult (see: this list of all the ways you could be completely wrong about everything).

"The most effective product you can sell a parent is guilt."

Kyle Studstill — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:54:53 +0000

I'm told that this cover of the New Yorker is inspiring parents to leave their phones home tonight. As Bud Caddell puts it, the most effective product you can sell a parent is guilt.

While it's not something I've had to experience yet, all conversation would indicate that the main draw to having kids seems to be the chance to recreate the 'magic of childhood.'

Of course it's quite like us to look back and romanticize the years of being 'carefree, innocent and full of wonder.' My experience has been that not everyone thinks back on growing up with longing eyes, but for the most part nostalgia is a big part of how we operate.

Project: Nostalgia

Perhaps this is yet another appropriate time for some reflection on Phillip Zimbardo's idea of time-orientation? My experience has certainly been that those who are a little less moved by the magic of childhood are a little more moved by the magic of delayed gratification.

At any rate I feel that thinking of this cover in terms of guilt is spot on. It's a guilt driven by our deeper need to fill our own children with 'perfect' memories of their own. Those of you who are parents: is your phone coming out with you tonight?

We're all natural born liars. It's absolutely what we "want."

Kyle Studstill — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:38:35 +0000

I'm quite convinced that the efforts we subconsciously put into fooling ourselves account for a great number of our conscious decisions.

One of my favorite iterations of this plays an active role in those activities that we begin with full gusto and all good intentions, only to find ourselves later struggling to follow through with a project that once seemed so inspiring (read: almost every single idea we have).

We've become so very proficient at telling ourselves that there's something else more exciting, more inspirational, more capable of being what we really want.

So of course the real question to figure out is: "is 'want' really the best way to describe the things that make us truly happy?"

Two ways we avoid obligations

Kyle Studstill — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:12:52 +0000

With the idea of obligation in mind I recently echoed a thought of Mark Twain's on the difference between work and play; here Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying has a few vaguely similar thoughts regarding the nature of laziness:

“There are different species of laziness: Eastern and Western. The Eastern style is like the one practised in India. It consists of hanging out all day in the sun, doing nothing, avoiding any kind of work or useful activity, drinking cups of tea, listening to Hindi film music blaring on the radio, and gossiping with friends. Western laziness is quite different. It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy.”

The Living Book project: QR codes, emotional insight, and an extraordinary blend of analog and digital content

Kyle Studstill — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 01:39:36 +0000

image via creativereview.co.uk

Mostly because I love outdoor/IRL experiences, and because I'm even more fond of experiences drawing on the power of finding/uncovering something interesting, I'm completely enamoured by the potential of QR codes.

The Living Book project invites people finding the Editoras Online's QR codes on the streets to snap a picture of the code via mobile camera, through which they receive a text message with a brief insight into someone's life - a thought about either love or hate fed through by Twitter.

As if that weren't fascinating enough, the project's most brilliant work is a book composed entirely of these QR codes, which refresh themselves every seven days. Certainly, they've sold out as quickly as you might imagine. Below is a quick description of how the team turned money originally destined for advertising dollars into something entirely more spectacular:

Canal+ on the power of storytelling

Kyle Studstill — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:27:51 +0000

Everyone loves a good story. I think when it comes to branding and marketing and products, we're so predisposed to thinking in terms of non-fiction that it's hard to make the conceptual jump to the emotional, engaging, fictional world. Steven Van Hook has a few quick thoughts on it here:

"Essentially, storytelling, and that includes PR, is having a point of view or theme, focusing on one person or thing (the hero) and taking your audience on that hero's journey through trials and tribulations to arrive at some new point, but now changed."

Everyone loves a good story.

Essentially, storytelling, and that includes PR, is having a point of view or theme, focusing on one person or thing (the hero) and taking your audience on that hero's journey through trials and tribulations to arrive at some new point, but now changed.

Rolighetsteorin: Volkswagen's Theory of Fun

Kyle Studstill — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:08:32 +0000

Ask most people who are successful, smart, happy, etc. what their secret is, and they'll likely tell you something like "To be honest I don't think I'm doing anything extraordinary..."

The thing is that we all know what we need to do to be happy and successful in our lives. We've been hearing these things for years. Always be honest. Don't study a day before the test, study throughout the semester. Brush your teeth twice a day. Do the extra little things. But we're very good at telling ourselves in the moment that what really makes us happy is something else. We know that we should wake up and take a quick run, but when we the alarm goes off we 'know' that we should get some more sleep because rest is important too.

Essentially, we convince ourselves that easier/more pleasurable=more desirable=what we really want.

The people who are happy and successfull simply do the little things we all know we should do.

Volkswagen's Rolighetsteorin (Theory of Fun) project in Sweden recognizes our natural aversion to the little things, taking the stand that "something as simple as happiness is the absolute easiest way to get people to change. It does not need to be more difficult than making things a bit more fun to make a change for the better."

In the spirit of building extraordinary social experiences (see: Samsung Builds Four Armies, Orchestrates a Massive War Experience), the project has put a bit more fun into the daily things we know we should be doing:

Pianotrappan Piano Steps - "Can we get more people to take the stairs over the escalator on a normal day in Stockholm, by making it more fun to take the stairs?"

The World's Deepest Dustbin - "Can we get more people to throw rubbish in the bin instead of on the ground by making it more fun?"

[What's that thing you should be doing that you're rationalizing away??]

Can we get more people to throw rubbish in the bin instead of on the ground by making it more fun?

A great and wise philosopher on the difference between work and play

Kyle Studstill — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 14:11:47 +0000

"If [Tom] had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign."

-Mark Twain

How relativity affects every decision we make: an experiment in making $20K worth more than $20K

Kyle Studstill — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:58:29 +0000

In the video above and in the his other works, the first point behavioral economist Dan Ariely is always quick to make is that we're horrendously bad at knowing what we want, and when it comes to decision-making we always always always make comparisons, relying heavily on relative context as a way to deal with the overwhelming complexity of most decisions we're faced with (see also: Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice).

The idea behind relative context explains why the highest priced items on a menu boost revenue (even if they are never ordered), and why we're drawn to mid-level options among groups of three or more, using the more extreme alternatives as guides to narrow down 'what we're really looking for.'

As for supporting the idea that we use context to deal with complexity, Ariely points to examples that illustrate the principle "when given the choice between option A, option B, and option -A (similar to A but easily determined to be worse), we choose option A," demonstrating that we tend to focus on things that are easily comparable. When deciding upon purchasing a colonial home, a contemporary home of the same value, or a contemporary home of the same value with the price lowered because of a roof that needs to be fixed, we forego the more abstract decision between colonial and contemporary for a decision based on the roof instead. The 'Rome vs France vs Rome Without Coffee' and the 'Tom vs Jerry vs Slightly Less Attractive Tom (or Jerry)' examples reiterate the point, illustrated below.

It occurred to me to play on the impressionability of our decision-making with an experiment of my own. My goal was to observe the different decisions made when people were posed with the hypothetical choice between staying in a city they loved (let's say a 9 on a 10 scale) with a job paying a particular salary, or to move to another, less-than-ideal city (7 on a scale of 10) for the same job paying an increased salary. The idea is that given all other things equal, the decision would (read: should) be made based on the increase in salary alone.

To illustrate the importance of local relativity, half of the college students I approached were asked to make the above decision while imagining their first job offer, at salaries of $40,000 for the 9-on-a-scale-of-10 city, and $60,000 for the less-than-ideal city; the other half were to imagine they were well established in their career, deciding between $110,000 and $130,000.

Final result? People are far more likely to stick with their current city when presented with the decision between the two larger sums of money. Why? Relatively, the jump from $40K to $60K is a 150% increase in salary, while the 'established career' decision only yields an increase of less than 20%. Although the difference in salary is objectively the same ($20,000 should be worth $20,000 no matter what, right?), the responses illustrate just how seriously we take relativity.

What I like most about these kinds of experiments is that they can be clearly likened to the 'irrationality as cognitive illusion' metaphor, bridging the gap between cognitive and visual illusion. Just looking at the graphic representation of the results above you can see it works in the exact same way as the 'which table is longer?' illusion Ariely touches on briefly.

Certainly there are a lot of other factors that naturally influence a person's decision here (both consciously and unconsciously) but really that's kind of the point. Salary and location are the only objective factors on which to support 'rationality' in this scenario; when it comes down to it, we're absurdly horrible at being objective and rational, despite how strongly we might think the opposite.

"How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God"

Kyle Studstill — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:29:48 +0000

David Linden's book of the above title uncovers each of these ideas in fine molecular-level detail, illustrating how the unique development and function of the human brain results in these core components of our reality. This flowchart hardly does the deep neuropsychological explanations any justice, but it's a good guide for understanding the basic whys behind each component and how they influence each other.

Demo Graphic Replicator: a project examining Social Intelligence vs. Artificial Intelligence

Kyle Studstill — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:11:46 +0000

This outstanding Demo Graphic Replicator project from Ag8 and ZeroInfluencer David Bausola takes a second of exploration to grasp completely, but If I'm getting it right, the project concept is fascinating - a bot engine approaching Artificial Intelligence, but opting for Social Intelligence instead. Character personalities are first defined by typical demographic/psychographic parameters and keywords tied to emotional states. Then, by relating to publicly available data via We Feel Fine/Twitter/etc, these characters are given life; with their own microblogging platforms, the characters express themselves through the statements of others with matching personalities.

What I'm seeing develop is a tool for identifying with audience and consumer profiles that extends beyond a Powerpoint slide persona and into an interactive simulation.

Each DGR's parameters include keywords tied to emotional states, times of the day, and days of the week; see ohlaylala's example here. Since each DGR currently precludes each statement with 'RT @xxxxx" they're not likely to pass any Turing tests anytime soon, but were there an easy way around that (there's not), it'd be interesting to see the kind of audience each personality would attract.

If a DGR were in your tweet stream making statements reflecting a collective of matching demo/psychographics (without the disclaimer RT's), would you think of it as a bot?

The DGR engine is being shared as open source; I'm excited to give a go at building a character of my own. [What personality should I give it?]