Timo Arnall

No to NoUI

Timo — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:22:57 +0000

‘The best design is invisible’ is the interaction design phrase of the moment. The images above are from my ever-expanding collection of quotes about how design and technology will ‘disappear’, become ‘invisible’ or how the ‘best interface is no interface’.

The Verge has recently given both Oliver Reichenstein and Golden Krishna a platform to talk about this. This has spawned manifestos, films, talks, books, #NoUI hashtags and some debates about what it might mean. I’ll call this cluster of things ‘invisible design’.

I agree with some of the reasons driving this movement; that design’s current infatuation with touchscreens is really problematic. I’ve spent the last eight years rallying against glowing rectangles, studying our obsession with screens and the ways in which this has become a cultural phenomena. In response I have been researching and inventing interfaces for taking interaction out from under the glass.

But I also take issue with much of the thinking for a few reasons that I’ll outline below.

1. Invisible design propagates the myth of immateriality

We already have plenty of thinking that celebrates the invisibility and seamlessness of technology. We are overloaded with childish mythologies like ‘the cloud’; a soft, fuzzy metaphor for enormous infrastructural projects of undersea cables and power-hungry data farms. This mythology can be harmful and is often just plain wrong. Networks go down, hard disks fail, sensors fail to sense, processors overheat and batteries die.

Computing systems are suffused through and through with the constraints of their materiality. – Jean-François Blanchette

Invisible design propogates the myth that technology will ‘disappear’ or ‘just get out of the way’ rather than addressing the qualities of interface technologies that can make them difficult or delightful.

Intentionally hiding the phenomena and materiality of interfaces, smoothing over the natural edges, seams and transitions that constitute all technical systems, entails a loss of understanding and agency for both designers and users of computing. Lack of understanding leads to uncertainty and folk-theories that hinder our ability to use technical systems, and clouds the critique of technological developments.

As systems increasingly record our personal activity and data, invisibility is exactly the wrong model.

By removing our knowledge of the glue that holds the systems that make up the infrastructure together, it becomes much more difficult, if not impossible, to begin to understand how we are constructed as subjects, what types of systems are brought into place (legal, technical, social, etc.) and where the possibilities for transformation exist. – Matt Ratto (2007)

In other words, as both users and designers of interface technology, we are disenfranchised by the concepts of invisibility and disappearance.

2. Invisible design falls into the natural/intuitive trap

The movement tells us to ‘embrace natural processes’ and talks about the ‘incredibly intuitive’ Mercedes car interface. This language is a trap (we should ban the use of natural and intuitive btw) that doesn’t give us any insight into how complex products might actually become simple or familiar.

Invisible design leads us towards the horrors of Reality Clippy. Does my refrigerator light really go off? Why was my car unlocked this morning? How did my phone go silent all of a sudden? Without highly legible systems for managing and understanding all of this ‘smartness’ we are going to get very lost and highly frustrated. The tricky business of push notifications and the Facebook privacy train wreck is just the tip of the iceberg.

The example of the Nest thermostat invisibly ‘learning’ your habits to control your home temperature is a good one. But the Nest has a highly visible interface that reassures you as to its status, tells you when it is learning, and a large dial for adjusting temperature. Beautiful, legible microinteractions. A Nest without these visual and direct manipulation interfaces would be useless, uncanny and frustrating. Nest wants UI.

The discussion around invisible design often talks about using sensors and tangible interfaces instead of visual interfaces. But these systems are not inherently simpler or more familiar. They have their own material qualities with edges and ‘grain’ that need to be understood and learnt. Their literal invisibility can cause confusion, even fear, and they often increase unpredictability and failure.

In our work with interface technologies such as RFID and computer vision, we’ve discovered that it takes a lot of work to make sense of the technologies as design materials. So it’s not useful to say that UI is ‘disappearing’ into sensing, algorithms and tangible interfaces, when we don’t fully understand them as UI yet.

3. Invisible design ignores interface culture

Interfaces are the dominant cultural form of our time. So much of contemporary culture takes place through interfaces and inside UI. Interfaces are part of cultural expression and participation, skeuomorphism is evidence that interfaces are more than chrome around content, and more than tools to solve problems. To declare interfaces ‘invisible’ is to deny them a cultural form or medium. Could we say ‘the best TV is no TV’, the ‘best typography is no typography’ or ‘the best buildings are no architecture’?

Much of our work at BERG is not just about solving problems, but about cultural invention:

We’re not interested in this idea of the invisible technology in a modernist sense. Tech won’t be visible but only if it’s embedded into the culture that it exists within. By foregrounding the culture, you background the technology. It’s the difference between grinding your way through menus on an old Nokia, trying to do something very simple, and inhabiting the bright bouncy bubbly universe of iOS. The technology is there, of course, but it’s effectively invisible as the culture is foregrounded.” – Jack Schulze (in Domus 965 / January 2013)

We should be able to simultaneously celebrate the fantastic explosion of diversity in UI, and develop healthy critique around the use of interfaces like touch screens. But by calling for UI to disappear altogether so that things can be more efficient, we remain in the same utilitarian and rational mindset that produces inert technological visions like this, rather than seeing interfaces as part of the cultural landscape.

4. Invisible design ignores design and technology history

The movement ignores at least thirty years of thinking in design and technology. A few examples:

Much of the recent invisible design discussions repeat the thinking in Jared Spool’s ‘Great Designs Should Be Experienced and Not Seen’ and Donald Norman’s ‘Invisible Computer. But a better reference point would be Don Norman’s earlier book, The design of everyday things, where he instead talks about the ‘problems caused by inadequate attention to visibility’ and supporting or managing our mental models of systems. We need a lot more thinking about our mental models of algorithms in particular.

Adam Greenfield has investigated the social and ethical issues around the development of ubiquitous computing systems, and is particularly concerned by its disappearance:

“Ubiquitous systems must contain provisions for immediate and transparent querying of their ownership, use, and capabilities. Everyware must, in other words, be self-disclosing. Whether such disclosures are made graphically, or otherwise, they ensure that you are empowered to make informed decisions as to the level of exposure you wish to entertain.” – Adam Greenfield (2006)

Some designers have talked about the actual qualities they want from ubiquitous computing interfaces, such as polite, pertinent and pretty:

“The vast quantities of information that personal informatics generate need not only to be clear and understandable to create legibility and literacy in this new world, but I’d argue in this first wave also seductive, in order to encourage play, trial and adoption” Matt Jones & Tom Coates (2008)

Matthew Chalmers has, more than anyone else, revealed the history of seamlessness. Seamlessness is ‘the deliberate “making invisible” of the variety of technical systems, artifacts, individuals and organizations that make up an information infrastructure. This work actively disguises the moments of transition and boundary crossing between these various parts in order to present a solid and seemingly coherent interface to users.’ (Ratto 2007). Although Mark Weiser is often thought of as an advocate of seamless systems, Chalmers found that:

Weiser describes seamlessness as a misleading or misguided concept. In his invited talks to UIST94 and USENIX95 he suggested that making things seamless amounts to making everything the same, reducing components, tools and systems to their ‘lowest common denominator’. He advocated seamful systems (with “beautiful seams”) as a goal. Around Xerox PARC, where many researchers worked on document tools, Weiser used an example of seamful integration of a paint tool and a text editor (Weiser, personal communication). He complained that seamless integration of such tools often meant that the user was forced to use only one of them. One tool would be chosen as primary and the others reduced and simplified to conform to it, or they would be crudely patched together with ugly seams. Seamfully integrated tools would maintain the unique characteristics of each tool, through transformations that retained their individual characteristics. This would let the user brush some characters with the paint tool in some artful way, then use the text editor to ‘search and replace’ some of the brushstroked characters, and then paint over the result with colour washes. Interaction would be seamless as the features of each tool were “literally visible, effectively invisible”. Seamful integration is hard, but the quality of interaction can be improved if we let each tool ‘be itself’. – Matthew Chalmers (2003)

Matt Ratto investigates the darker side of this drive towards invisibility, revealing that seamlessness encourages:

“a particular kind of passivity and lack of engagement between people and their actions and between people and their social and material environment” and that we must “critique the clean, orderly, and homogenous future that is at the heart of these modernist visions” – Matt Ratto (2007)

And Anne Galloway suggests that it is in the seams where the design work can be done:

“Although seamlessness may remain a powerful and effective metaphor to guide particular projects, when it comes to actually getting the work done—and the challenges of having to do it with people who can be very different from each other—then I suggest it is in everyone’s best interests to recognise the importance of seams and scars in marking places where interventions can be made, or where potential can be found and acted upon.” – Anne Galloway (2007)

In interaction design we need to look at the long history of Durrell Bishop’s work, one of the strongest advocates for self-evident design, whether it is physical or virtual, through his teaching and design practice. Durrell’s ‘Platform 12’ in the RCA Design Products course attempts to see design as:

“a celebration of a model for how things work, where once again we can treat function as beauty, instead of merely treating design as form and image.”

Durrell’s work on the Marble Answering Machine (1992) is a brilliant piece of self-evident design, and remains a touchstone for all interaction design work.

Designers also need to look at the first four chapters of ‘Where the action is’ by Paul Dourish which give a coherent account of the relationships between human abilities and computer interfaces over the last 50-60 years. Dourish shows how interfaces are not becoming invisible, but how they are increasingly social and tangible.

And finally, from a design perspective, there is a long tradition of making complex products legible and understandable. Industrial designer Konstantin Grcic talks about the relationship between the technologies and the use of an object:

“A machine is beautiful when it’s legible, when its form describes how it works. It isn’t simply a matter of covering the technical components with an outer skin, but finding the correct balance between the architecture of the machine… and an expressive approach that is born out of the idea of interaction with those using the object.” – Konstantin Grcic (2007)

And perhaps more famously, Dieter Rams has always talked of honesty and understanding in his product design practice. Making a product understandable is one of his Ten Principles of “Good Design”.

This drive for understanding needs to go further than physical form (as it has done at Apple) and start to inform the design of systems and UI.

Towards legible, evident interaction

We must abandon invisibility as a goal for interfaces; it’s misleading, unhelpful and ultimately dishonest. It unleashes so much potential for unusable, harmful and frustrating interfaces, and systems that gradually erode users and designers agency. Invisibility might seem an attractive concept at first glance, but it ignores the real, thorny, difficult issues of designing and using complex interfaces and systems.

We might be better off instead taking our language from typography, and for instance talk about legibility and readability without denying that typography can call attention to itself in beautiful and spectacular ways. Our goal should be to ‘place as much control as possible in the hands of the end-user by making interfaces evident’.

Of course the interfaces we design may become normalised in use, effectively invisible over time, but that will only happen if we design them to be legible, readable, understandable and to foreground culture over technology. To build trust and confidence in an interface in the first place, enough that it can comfortably recede into the background.

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Immaterials at the Vimeo awards 2012

Timo — Tue, 22 May 2012 09:17:05 +0000

The film Immaterials: Light painting WiFi made with Einar Sneve Martinussen and Jørn Knutsen as part of the Yourban project is a finalist at the Vimeo Awards 2012.

The awards ceremony is on the 7 June at 8PM in New York City. The Vimeo Festival also looks great!

Robot readable world

Timo — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:39:00 +0000

This is a short film, an experiment in machine-vision footage. It uses found-footage from computer vision research to explore how machines are making sense of the world.

As robots begin to inhabit the world alongside us, how do they see and gather meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us? Machines have a tiny, fractional view of our environment, that sometimes echoes our own human vision and often doesn’t.

Read more about the film and have a look at Matt Jones’ talk of the same title.

Three films on communication and networks

Timo — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 11:25:25 +0000

In the last two weeks I’ve seen three documentaries dealing with communication and networks.

Firstly, a broad and ambitious film from Ericsson, taking on the ‘networked society’ including interviews with David Weinberger, Catarina Fake and Eric Wahlforss.

Each of the interviewees discusses the emerging opportunities being enabled by technology as we enter the Networked Society. Concepts such as borderless opportunities and creativity, new open business models, and today’s ‘dumb society’ are brought up and discussed.

The next film from Nokia brings daily life around networked communication technologies to the forefront, and does it through lovely experiential sequences. However it does come across much more as a branding exercise or promotional piece, and doesn’t offer to explain or explore the practices it shows.

Third is a film by Ben Mendelsohn and Alex Chohlas-Wood about the physical, geographic and material infrastructure that goes into running the internet.

Lower Manhattan’s 60 Hudson Street is one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity. This short documentary peeks inside, offering a glimpse of the massive material infrastructure that makes the Internet possible.

There is clearly a need to unpack the increasingly technology-inflected geography, and social and cultural practices of the world we inhabit, so it is good to see films like this being made.

Talk to Me

Timo — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 11:56:44 +0000

I have five works in MoMA’s latest exhibition ‘Talk to Me’ in New York. The works are Nearness, Immaterials, Media Surfaces, The Journey and Suwappu.

I have written more about the exhibition and the works at the Touch and BERG weblogs. The exhibition has also been reviewed by CNN, the New York Times, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal amongst others.

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The films of Adam Lisagor

Timo — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 09:03:19 +0000

I’ve been quite taken with the films of Adam Lisagor for a while.

I make small, palatable videos, like commercials, for companies involved in tech, to figure out how to convey the essence of their products in concise, accessible ways.

I like to think that I’m able to do this because I think slowly enough to notice the exact points while using a product at which I respond with the most delight. And if I can reproduce those moments on-screen, without explicitly saying that they’re delightful, an audience will intuitively understand the delight they might feel themselves.

(From an interview in Business Insider.)

He’s good at surfacing the joy and pleasure in some of the smallest interactions, particularly evident in this ad for the Jambox by Jawbone.

Mother. Father. Always you wrestle inside me.

Timo — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 12:41:26 +0000

A truth that releases a waterfall of emotion. It is this energy that propels us through The Tree of Life. A voluptuous, bulging energy shaped and encouraged by sweeping camera movement, ultra wide lenses, lyrical blocking, the safe-harbor of Jessica Chastain’s face, and the vacillation in Hunter McCracken’s. These combine to create scenes that perfectly capture the rapturous feelings of childhood. Sensations evoked when light & dark entwine, and our instinctual knowledge that these things are the same.

And on how to approach the film:

A moment long enough for me to relax, and I was suddenly taken by a feeling of great tenderness and calm. I don’t completely understand why I felt this, but the inclusion of these CGI dinosaurs struck me as an particularly affectionate and loving decision. Terrence Malick believes in his audiences, and has faith that we also can believe. It’s the feeling of your mother brushing the hair off your forehead as she tells you a bedtime story. You protest because she’s changed a part of the usual tale, or it’s not the way you want it to be, but smiling, she says “Shhh shhh. Just listen.”

From the brilliant Kartina Richardson.

Branding with badges

Timo — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 10:00:56 +0000

Many of the early ideas were fairly conceptual: Not a place or a thing, but an idea tied to the use of Foursquare itself (“10 check-ins”) or the kind of real-world social behavior the service was attempting to leverage (checking into the same place three times in one week, or checking in with two people of the opposite sex). The round shape and circular border directly referenced Boy Scouts merit badges. Beyond that, Sheibley says the relevant design context wasn’t logos, it was the familiar instructional iconography meant to signal ideas without words: “How do you communicate to people in an airport, who don’t speak the same language, where the bathroom is?”

Summify – Rob Walker: On Slate: Branding with badges

Midnight Run

Timo — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 22:17:59 +0000

My favourite movie of all time.

A film with one compelling relationship at its center might not survive the bombardments of the action formula its script demands, and that’s another reason “Midnight Run” is so special. There are at least half a dozen relationships throughout the film surrounding Grodin and De Niro that ring true in their entirety. A phone call between an angry mob boss and his bumbling enforcer, for example, could very easily be made into a transitional scene devoid of intrinsic value, but this film does something different on those occasions: it utilizes shards of moments as points of insight and endows them with authenticity largely nonessential to the plot.

Via Overlooked Movie Monday: Midnight Run » Scene-Stealers.

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Stealthie!

Timo — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 17:20:47 +0000

Nice work from Richard Hogg: Hi I’m Stealthie!

Connecting the digital world with print

Timo — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 10:47:17 +0000

A rare piece of writing from Durrell Bishop:

What if there was a generic tool to link the digital and the physical worlds? A way to touch an object, to select and see its digital augmentation? It would just send a message via your chosen device: laptop, mobile, home wifi et al. The equivalent of a digital finger. Passive objects would act as physical buttons to the digital world. All that these objects would require is that we perceive their purpose, and see how to act on them. We would need to have an accessible tool to make our selection, and carry out the link between the two worlds.

Read the whole thing: Connecting the digital world with print.

Science Fiction Film as Design Scenario Exercise for Psychological Habitability

Timo — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 14:37:11 +0000

“They deliver potentially fundamental insights (Schneider, 2005) into the interaction between humans and the constructed environment surrounding them, including the mundance aspects of everyday routine (Carroll, 2000), even the potential subversion of the system or setting through its agents (Blythe & Wright, 2006). The user is advanced into a character or specific persona placed in fictional but feasible settings (Nielsen, 2002). The representation of scenarios through prototypes, use of storyboards, video, rapid prototyping tools and stories, annotated sketches, cartoons, photographs, role-playing or live dramatization (Suri & Marsh, 2000), allows the vision conveyed through the scenario to be opened up to critique (Carroll, 2000).”

“Design, here, does not assume the traditional role of problem-solving, but acts as a critical agent in the enquiry about real human needs and values by evoking reflection (Carroll, 1995) and stimulating debate amongst designers, industry and the public (Dunne & Raby, 2001). This critical strand in design, termed speculative design, critical design or design fiction, has emerged as a field in its own right and is establishing itself with the main markers of a new discipline, such as seminal publications (Dunne, 2005; Antonelli, 2008), exhibitions and conferences.”

Science Fiction Film as Design Scenario Exercise for Psychological Habitability: Production Designs 1955-2009

A phone to save us from our screens?

Timo — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 21:21:11 +0000

Microsoft has two new ads, anticipating their upcoming Windows Phone 7 launch. The first is an almost post-apocalyptic vision of humanity stuck with their heads in their mobile devices:

Here’s David Webster, chief strategy officer in Microsoft’s central marketing group, explaining their anti-screen strategy:

“Our sentiment was that if we could have an insight to drive the campaign that flipped the category on its head, then all the dollars that other people are spending glorifying becoming lost in your screen or melding with your phone are actually making our point for us.”

The problem of glowing rectangles is a subject close to my heart, and Matt Jones has been bothered by the increase in mobile glowing attention-wells.

I think Microsoft & Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s advertising strategy stands out in a world full of slick floaty media. The only problem is that without any strategy towards tangible interaction, I’m not sure the ‘tiles’ interaction concept is strong enough to actually take people’s attention out of the glass.

The Longest Photographic Exposures

Timo — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:53:13 +0000

The Longest Photographic Exposures in History.

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Olars: physical toy inspired by karl sims evolved creatures

Timo — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 12:37:45 +0000

A lovely piece of work by Lars M. Vedeler and Ola Vågsholm from the Tangible Interactions course at The Oslo School of Architecture & Design:

Olars is an electronic interactive toy inspired by Karl Sims’ evolved virtual creatures. Having thousands of varieties in movement and behaviour by attaching different geometrical limbs, modifying the angle of these, twisting the body itself, and by adjusting the deflection of the motorised joints, results in both familiar and strange motion patterns.

Olars on Vimeo

Graphical data fiction

Timo — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 17:43:21 +0000

Sumedecina and Graphical data fiction.

Chronocyclegraph of bricklaying

Timo — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:52:03 +0000

By Frank Gilbreth (1912)

Via lecture 4: traces at light matters.

The future is Movie OS

Timo — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:08:37 +0000

Still from the film xXx from Mark Coleran’s portfolio.

The idea that Apple is grasping at real-life objects because they support effective visual storytelling is very interesting:

In Movie OS, visual storytelling is used to make the system’s important, critical reaction to a user’s action abundantly clear. In Movie OS, you know if you’re logging into Facebook.

I’d argue that visual storytelling doesn’t exist – if it does, it hardly exists at all – in computer or consumer eletronics user interfaces. The entire palette of visual storytelling in terms of interface, through accident of history, is purely engineering and control-led.

This is where, I’d say, Apple is grasping when it says that interfaces should sometimes look toward real-life objects. Real-life physical objects have affordances that are used in effective visual storytelling – and animation – that can be used well to make clear the consequences of actions. It’s more complicated than that, though, and it can go horribly wrong as well as right.

From Dan Hon at Extenuating Circumstances – The future is Movie OS.

Sun visualisation using pinhole cameras

Timo — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:22:47 +0000

Sun’s path June to December Via Tom Armitage.

Negotiating futures. Design fiction

Timo — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 17:44:46 +0000

Swiss Design Network Conference 2010:

Designers see the world not simply as it is, but rather as it could be. In this perspective, the world is a laboratory to explore the contingency of the existing and the thinking in options. Imaginations of the contra factual are a key source for the creation of alternative political, technological, social, or economic constellations of artefacts, interfaces, signs, actors, and spaces. At the same time, strategies of materialization are pivotal to shift the boundary between the fictional and the real and to finally bring possible new realities into being. The conference addresses the questions of how fictions are designed and how the multiplicity of possible new futures is negotiated and realized.

Design Fiction, Negotiating Futures October 28-30, 2010.

Proximity payments

Timo — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 11:43:37 +0000

YouTube – The new PayPal iPhone app seems to use the Bump API to match up two physical gestures and make a payment. (I even like their tacky faux-anthropology video).

And Square has just announced their payment app for the iPad.

CCD and computational photography

Timo — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:52:27 +0000

A few links on imaging and computation:

I’ve concluded that the promise of RFID was eclipsed by another technology out there that’s poised to become more and more disruptive, not only to RFID, but to a host of technologies, and that’s the CCD.

from CCD by Joe Gregorio. Via BERG.

Cameras might allow a photographer to record a scene and then alter the lighting or shift the point of view, or even insert fictitious objects.

from Computational Photography, American Scientist

The camera as a device you carry has completely disappeared. Image sensors have become part of the literal fabric of everyday life.

from What Photography Will Look Like By 2060

Practising tomorrows

Timo — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:32:14 +0000

It takes ubiquitous computing as a significant case study because the future orientation practised in ubiquitous computing research and development is emblematic of the perpetual technological forecasting in which humanity engages.

“Practising tomorrows? Ubiquitous computing and the politics of anticipation” a PhD by Sam Kinsley.

via Anne

The Films of Charles & Ray Eames

Timo — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:15:00 +0000

“While Charles & Ray were frequently contracted by corporations like Polaroid, Westinghouse, and IBM, they never made films on demand. Nearly all their films represent a symbiotic relationship between the artist and the client, and they only made films when there was genuine interest. Witness Westinghouse ABC (1965), which is essentially a montage of the Westinghouse product line (note that the Westinghouse logo was designed by Paul Rand). Even here there is a spirited interest in the subject. In the film, Charles & Ray focus on the technology and typography at a break-neck tempo and transform what would otherwise be an incredibly dry subject into something rich and lively. Also, in SX-70 (1972), intended as a promotional film for the newly released Polaroid SX-70 camera, the Eames’ take advantage of the opportunity to discuss optics, transistors and to display their own polaroid photographs.

A good overview via The Films of Charles & Ray Eames.

3D secret – hidden pictures

Timo — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 11:44:39 +0000

Beautiful new exploratory game for the Nintendo DS, that uses the front-facing camera and face tracking to calculate a perspective that renders like a window on a new world.

DSi「立体かくし絵　アッタコレダ. Via BERG

Curious Displays

Timo — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:00:41 +0000

Curious Displays by Julia Yu Tsao

Denisa Kera & Jimmy Loizeau

Timo — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:27:42 +0000

Denisa Kera & Jimmy Loizeau: 18:46 in The Futurity Long Conversation.

Augmented (hyper)Reality

Timo — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:11:38 +0000

Augmented (hyper)Reality by Keiichi Matsuda

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.

A competent visualisation of an undesirable future.

Parisian Love

Timo — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 09:11:01 +0000

New Google ad: Parisian Love.

Augmentia

Timo — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:31:10 +0000

Anselm lays out the emerging issues with Augmented Reality (AR). In doing so he relates it to a whole host of known and unknown problems associated with ubiquitous computing, semantic publishing and data platforms.

Below are some clippings of bits that seem particularly insightful:

It puts own embodiment at risk. And whomsoever can mitigate that risk while providing reward will probably do well. I believe that organizations such as Apple and Google see this and are pursuing not merely real-time, or hyper-local or crowd-sourced apps but ownership of the “view”.

…

Everybody wants a part of the lens of reality, the zero-click base layer beneath the beneath. As Gene Becker puts it “The World is the Platform”. And an ecosystem is starting to emerge.

…

Suddenly game developers are arguing with GIS experts and having to unify their very different ways of describing mirror worlds.

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[I]nterfaces move from being heavy and solid with big heavy buttons and knobs and rotary dials to becoming liquid and effortless like the dynamic UI of the iPhone to becoming like air itself.

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By making hidden things visible, and visible things cheap, it will make other things possible that we don’t entirely realize yet.

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There will be user interface interaction issues. What will be the conventions for hand-swipes, grabs, drags, pulls and other operations to manipulate objects in our field of view.

…

[AR] is not simply “memory” – it isn’t just a mnemonic that helps bring understanding closer to the surface of consciousness. Clearly we are surrounded by our own memories, signage, advertising, radio, friends voices and an already rich complicated teeming natural landscape loaded with signifiers and cues. But it is another bridge between personal lived experience and the experience of others. It seems to lower costs of knowing, and it seems to provide stronger subjective filters.

…

Augmented Reality seems to at least offer the possibility that we can punch some holes in the boxes. It seems to offer a bridge between structure and chaos rather than just structure.