To begin with that theme. I think that the talk of Ubi de Feo on his project From 0 to C. He is learning you to master code by understanding the fundamentals. And by mastering the this fundamentals emerges great results. Apart from the nice execution of his method – like a great art director would do (…) – also a key concept in the evening.

The whole principle of mastering the core of coding emerging in a kind of new nature was what made the project Deleting Borders of We Work We Play so nice. The presentation dealt for a great part on the way the commissioned work and workers in a bartering system, the graphics that resulted from the analyses on the system is as beautiful in behaviour as in visual experience.

Dries Depoorter is a still very young interactive visualizer. Works in Processing a lot and was very true in the analysis of his own work and what happened. It was very powerful in its simplicity, in also getting to the core of making an interactive experience. Both the translator as the light scan he explained with a touch for the essence. The beauty of plant scan is in the way it brings the scan alive, making it into a living thing even.

And that links to the great work Fearless Symmetry of Ruairi Glynn, who is that much more experienced that he can create the same living machine on purpose, by designing not by coincidence. He masters the process, he showed in the answers to the questions and the sidelines on the researched choices he made for his installation in the Tate Modern hos mastership. At the same time it was an iconic This happened talk that show how hard work it is to accomplish a great work, something you don’t understand by itself looking at the work or the sleek movies.

His story and his work including all the things he could not tell even, it showed how understanding the core of machines is part of making things that really have meaning. And how the route to mastering is an almost necessary part.

Check also the story in tweets.

This is not a strange thought, because it fits a strategy for Yahoo! to build something beautiful out of Flickr and Tumblr. It is no coincidence that Flickr is redesigned in the way it is now, and offering a huge amount of storage with it. Flickr needed a new path to compete with the social photo sharing that has become that dominant with Instagram. Building Flickr as a backbone for Tumblr and making Tumblr the social realtime channel for Flickr is very smart. Tumblr has a big footprint in the creative world, Flickr is transforming its presence towards a much more portfolio look like 500px.

What will be next? Flickr stretching with full video is a logical step. With the offer of huge storage is something that could not be limited for photos, makes no sense. Maybe an acquisition of Vimeo would be the most logical next step fitting the strategy, or else: building Flickr into the first platform that combines video and photos nicely. With Tumblr as the publication engine.

On the conference day there was a mix of speakers but all were on the more contemplative approach. Like Tijmen Wisman that did quite a rant on the privacy aspects. Ending with a conclusion that IoT leads to slavery. It can be like a trojan horse as it enters your home and makes the last real private place public too. This is indeed an important aspect of the Internet of Things that should not be overlooked. It could be like a weapon, in the wrong hand it could do harm. If you lose control on your data you lose your privacy. Creating awareness is in that sense important.

Earlier that day Nicole Dewandre of the EU committee told about the onlife research initiative within the EU she is responsible for. She sees a paradox in keeping the focus on people as sensitive beings in a high functional context that the connected world is shaping.

The shift that is happening: we had the primacy of entities, now the primacy of interactions. “Boundaries are not fences but restricted connections.” This is an interesting concept because of the link to the connected world. Our boundaries are not defined by something geospacial, but by the existence of connections. From the sky is the limit to the earth is the limit, we are now coming to the self is the limit.

In the same flow was the talk of Carolyn Strauss from Slowlab. The introduction movie made the whole concept looking quite soft, but it turned out that she introduced some concepts that can be inspiring in the thinking on our connected world.

She mentioned six principles of slow design: reveal, expand, reflect, engage, participate, evolve. She did not go into deep for all of these, and did not connect them to the Internet of Things context, something that could be done easy. She asked herself the question if the Internet of Things could be made slow. That is the wrong question I think, you can create slow things with the help of Internet of Things principles looking to the six principles. Adding a reflective layer to products from the context, creating options to engage. Etcetera. I think Tellart have shown some great examples of that approach in their work, for instance for Google Chrome Lab and even more with the Love Song Machine. And also a lot of the work of BERG is a proof of that, only think of Little Printer.

So in the end the thoughts of Carolyn were interesting, the way she wants to execute them in this domain could be much more interesting.

This is an aspect that could be an important part in the education of IoT. The discussion on Wednesday was good to see how the agencies has a different approach still with some similarities. Seeing Internet of Things more as evolution of interaction based design. Where data is a distinctive value and invention an important design strategy. Enough inspiration for the educational system, where the biggest barriers the silos in disciplines are, that are forced by the rule system.

The boys from Perceptor kicked off with a talk on their design for the webshop of Mendo, a book shop for table books. They try to approach the design of the shop different from normal shops by making visual stories on every book, something which fits the kind of books very well, and is also only possible with the small amount of inventory and dedication of shop owners that are designers themselves.

The shop has some tricks that are both practical and elements to give it an extra human touch. Showing the size of the book by the comparison with a sticky note and iPad. Also the possibility to get personal suggestions by a bookseller based on your wishes. The design is very strong in its hierarchy and eye for details.

As Bastiaan said: Better have beautiful seams than have seamless experience where you get lost. It turns out that the website is used for orientation more than buying. Something that is maybe even triggered by the way it is designed; you experience how important it is with these books to feel them.

The talk of Kristi Kuusk was interesting for things she did not tell or did. It seems like a kind of strange choice to stimulate the craftsmanship in textile making by adding a quite straightforward augmented concept. Especially because the connection between these kind of fabric production and the possibilities of the AR are rather weak; also every mass production cheap sheets can do the same, even better maybe.

And in the end possibly the most interesting part of the Bedtime Stories would have been to think how to add something to the stories that emerge in the in-between space. As BERG managed to do with Suwappu. Kristi wants to create a deeper connection with the textile and its production, there lies a chance in really adding something from the code/space into the textile, that can be unlocked. So therefor lies for me the most interesting part of this project, hope she can add that one time.

The last speaker of the night was Mattijs Kneppers talking on his ongoing development of ShowSync, a new way to connect audio and light into one balanced experience. More like the other time he presented the technology part of Eboman on This happened Utrecht, this project has a more aim, not only for the artist he developed it with (Feed Me). The trick is that he is creating an ecosystem with the elements of audio and lights linked together. It forces the different roles that makes a performance interesting working together on the same experience. Hopefully it can create a kind of standard so that it also will be possible to implement in situations where the lighting system is part of the venue instead of the artists entourage.

The talk of Mattijs was very nice to experience again. Showing his passion for the experience of audio and light and the way this can be connected to a digital virtual representation. And how this virtual component is in the end maybe even more defining for the experience than the psychical one. Which should be definitely the case for the concept of Bedtime Stories. And writing this down, it strikes me that this could be said of the work on Mendo too, if a shopper of a book that makes it’s orientation has probably a better experience of the book on the table later, than without. Which fits this edition in the end quite good to the theme of the week: Internet of Things.

But that is not something I wanted to elaborate on now, maybe sometime in the future. For me the reason to attend the sessions is the positive vibe and inspiration you can harvest from the utopians. Adding your own context make it valuable for thinking on the future, also the near one. And that is also something that is strongly present in these events. It gives good insights in the bigger changes in our world. And one that was very heavenly part of this event was the moving to a DIY world. You can say that singularity equals self-made-manship. We are in control of our own life expectation is the bigger picture, for the now we see a strong shift to DIY services and behaviour.

Yuri van Geest kicked of which a pile of examples, and Maarten den Braber added those from the quantified self culture. DIY health is of course important as shown in the talk on SynBio. And the two startups did pinpoint this as well; the 3D Hubs to make 3D printing even more accessible. And Poikos that scan your body as the starting point for all kind of self reflection. Jack Andraka showed how DIY science can lead to stunning results.

Harald Neidhardt of MLove gave probably the broadest reflections in his talk. The iPhones 8 to 20 are always good metaphors for thinking, however those will maybe not ever exist. Interesting of the story of the disappearing phone is the way he sketched how human and tech is really morphing. Everything is software as Andreessen stated a couple years ago. He meant all stuff we use, all services. That leads to disruptive models and experiences. Imagine what happens as we humans are completely compatible to the computed world. We are not living in the cloud, we are the cloud.

You can think we have this total DIY context in a couple years, and we can manipulate and control everything ourselves. I think we will see that the model of producer and consumer and regulator will find a new balance. Just like the future will not come to us as a big bang, will technology not change all of the characteristics of human behaviour. With the DIY culture we may refer back to some models we used to have in the craftsmanship-ages. As Sterling made clear; the future is not one-dimensional.

Then I saw another video, that has also a heavy part of first person footage in it, totally distorted to fit the music.

And that made me think these are the signals of our future reality, as art is often an signal for the future. This is how Glass will enter our world as a new common visual language.

The tour was part of the 24HOost program, 24 hours of activities in the east of Amsterdam. The second edition of this event to let inhabitants of Amsterdam and other experience the city. Noord, West, and Zuid will follow.

The whole philosophy of the Lloyd hotel is to provide guests with experiences. Unexpected ones. And to create serendipity, by mixing the different types of rooms and providing places to discover, by taking away classes, on the outside of the rooms can not be seen if it one or five star room.

Functions of rooms can change, from meeting place to sleeping room. It demands a flexible workforce that is able to self organise. All staff gets cross training in the beginning, experience all roles in the hotel. A true example of self organising teams so it seems.

Suzanne is an open but strong character. So much is clear from the way she lead the group. The group was too big for the tour if you look objectively, but she managed to keep everyone together, and trust all people to be responsible for themselves. This worked well, and you can feel that this is the same for the hotel as a whole.

Her passion lies mainly in the artistic quality of the hotel, in the art pieces or high quality design that is ubiquitous, but also mingled with less predictable vintage. With this approach the hotel gets its very own signature and are all rooms a experience on its own. In that sense this hotel offers the same excitement as an Airbnb-apartment can have, with the personal touch.

So this experience of the tour showed a couple of things. The recipe of a strong vision combined with a very open execution can create beautiful things. Making a personal experience in a hotel is the only way to deal with the growing popularity of services like Airbnb.

The conference grows bigger and bigger each year, now almost 25.000 people attending the interactive conference, with more than 1000 talks and panels to chose from. No surprise it is hard to boil it down to one overall theme. You could have a complete different experience from another by choosing your talks. In five days of conference I attended 23 talks, see the overview at the bottom.

In general I found it remarkable that there was clearly less loud promotion of new apps all over the convention area. We had Leap Motion and the talking shoes of Google, but on average I found the focus less on products than on stories. Sign of the times. Of course there were enough startups promoting stuff, and there were start up sessions, and I saw some in the talks (Trap!t, Ditto, Desti). One of the few that were heavily promoting was Levelup, a new payment system. I made an account and paid different food at the convention center.

Looking back I am thinking on a couple of themes, connected to eachother:

• Startups becoming the artists. The role of startups seems a bit in flux. The lean startup approach is hard with the complexity in big data and artificial intelligence. Startups becoming more serious in business. On the other hand startup-culture is still valued for their disruptive thinking, but then more distinct from real world developments. More like artists doing research by doing.
• Embodied interfaces. We see it also on the introduction of the new Samsung s4 telephone just after SxSW, we will experience a move to embodied interactions. With real products, enhanced (enchanted) with digital and sensor. With gesture interfaces like the Leap, with digital-physical connections like the Makerbot Digitizer ultimo. But also new interfaces with a digital ubiquitous layer as Glass.
• Big data and tiny services. Good to see how my mantra is also recognizable in the talks on big data and artificial intelligence. Making services based on human values using big data is the way to go. Using bots and drones for human focused services.
• Quantified self is ubiquitous. Not only at the conference, but also in the daily life of the American judging all devices already available in the shops. Self-tracking as mean for self-healing is not far away for the self made culture of the US.
• eHealth is becoming big. A lot of startups in this field, a lot of talks on healthier life by better behaviour. Connected to the quantified self.
• Behaviour design is the big resolution to cope with big data and eHealth, the combining factor of it all. You could fill a whole program with behavior design talks on this SxSW.

Looking to these overall trends, I think you can easily connect those together to a bigger theme; the way we are going to let our life be ruled by data and use the data to create a healthier life. This could be something we are ruled by, or that we rule ourself.

In this context of big and personal data is behavior design the medicine for a creating a better life. I think we will see this profession flourish even more with the growing number of personal devices.

Source: Business Insider

Our world has changed dramatically the last years, as this photo of the announcement of the pope proves. We all have become cyberpunks now, as Bruce Sterling noted. The next level is really the way all these touch-points of (sensor) data will integrate in our life. The post digital world we have moved in – as I discussed on a lot the last year – has became fully integrated, so much is proven by this years SxSW.

An overview. All the talks I followed:

• Opening Remarks from Bre Pettis
• What Can We Learn from the Unabomber?
• The Consumerization of Revolutions
• SRI’s Secrets to Successful Innovation
• Why Tiny Habits Give Big Results
• David over Goliath: Power of the Sharing Economy
• Elon Musk Keynote
• Al Gore on The Future
• Hooking Up Happier: Design Insight from Grindr
• Behavior Change as Value Proposition
• Tina Roth Eisenberg Keynote
• Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Drone?
• The New Serendipity?
• Bots for Civic Engagement
• Stephen Wolfram: The Computational Future
• A Robot in Your Pocket: AI Powered Applications
• Edison vs. Tesla & the Myth of the Lone Inventor
• Designing Habits: From Big Data to Small Changes
• Enchanted Objects
• The Science of Marketing
• Esther Dyson, Release 0.9
• Peter Thiel: You Are Not A Lottery Ticket
• Bruce Sterling Closing Remarks

I try to make keep up with live reporting via Twitter, here you can find all tweets here.

And as I said, I made 5 day reports:
Day 1: copying the real world
Day 2: tiny habits and big dreams
Day 3: designing behaviour and serendipity
Day 4: making sense of robotics
Day 5: closing the betterama future

See you next year!

One of the points Erwin made was that profiling people based on based on big data could lead to misunderstanding of people. He always is suggested to listen to U2 Pearl Jam because he likes Depeche Mode Nirvana while he hates U2 Pearl Jam (I don’t be sure on the exact band names anymore, sorry about that. Please correct me :-). This is a danger, just like the misinterpretation of behavior in e-shops when you are buying for someone else and the collaborative filtering is advising you comparable titles, especially if it is stored in a profile that last longer than the session.

An extreme result of this kind of profiling is the talk of Tinkebell at TEDxAmsterdam where she showed how here online identity is now totally defined by people that misjudged her art pieces. And because our digital identity is merged with our real life identity this is a serious problem.

So I agree that there is a danger of profiling based on (big) data. But I think that this is in the end not a result of the principles of (big) data, but is caused by a bad use of the data and a bad design of the profiling system. The way to build good data based profiling and personal user experiences is by creating several layers of data intelligence.

The Big Data is especially used for creating a layer of related objects. In the example of the music, it is possible to combine the use of songs (listening) by people into a relational system where likely relations are defined. It is more on expected chance of relations than on hard relations though. It is a loose coupling that never can be connected to people. To make it clear. Every entry of new data by listening to songs adds more smartness to the system.

The hardest part is that the data model should not be built on majorities, but on single combinations. The relations are only used for serendipity, for suggesting new stuff to users.

There we enter the second layer, that of the user. The dataset with objects in this layer is not based on relations between the items, all objects stay on its own. The suggestions are not baked into the user profile, they are generated in every session and based on the suggestions in layer 1.
The result is that the profile of an user does not exist of advised objects, and is never defined by the machine. The combination of users in layer 2 and objects in layer 1 is always event based.
This also works for building relations between people. A good recommendation system is not trying to connect the profile from the user to another profile, it should search actively in similarities in the 1st layer triggered by the profiles of people.

A third layer is the stored intelligence. In layer 2 the objects of the user are stored, in layer 3 the behaviour is stored. Certain reactions to suggestions, especially high-level and low-level are kept to prevent repeated questions. All known reactions are stored, and so if Erwin has indicated one time that he does not like U2 it will not be presented anymore.

The last element is the active engine that connects the different layers. That engine should be smart too. The engine is connecting objects and preventing presenting double actions. At the same time it needs to create serendipity. It should ask for confirmation once in a while by breaking the rules of the third layer.

This approach asks of course more activity in the system, the performance is definitely a tough nut to crack, always. With the Big Data products like Hadoop and the supporting tools it could be possible to build this continuous ad-hoc profiling situation.

The most important characteristic of this Big Data for Tiny Services is the humbleness of the system to the user. The system should be designed in a dialogue that provides a system that is used by the user, not one that steers the use.

But is the real power of this function not in something else. In the mobile version of this search. Something that gets Facebook really going on mobile even. I make a link to another app that does not succeeded after the introduction at SxSW in 2011, Ditto. This app was very well designed and smart in the purpose. This app meant to give you the opportunity to share your intentions in the short term in order to make your social peers aware and create rendezvous moments. The way to create the events was beautiful and it is still one of the best designed mobile apps. It lacked however the necessary user base and with that the data to create interesting experiences. And without that no users were starting to use it. It was simply just another social network for most of us.

I think a Ditto like design and service build on the data of Facebook and interacts like the new Graph Search could make a great service for getting recommendations. A smart search that integrates the context awareness could be a serious competitor for Google Now. With the data of Facebook this kind of data could make it into a social driven recommendation tool on the spot.

And for the controlling of the app could it even be an important tool to let voice controlled interaction commands tipping.

Quick thought, feels like an interesting route to me, however needs some extra thinking to make it into a real valuable tool. That is easier if we have experienced the Graph Search in real life. Curious to see how it turns out, or better, how it is played out.