Is the New Aesthetic only about visual stuff?

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The panel about New Aesthetic at SXSW last month left me with the impression that NA is all about visual representations:

"One of the core themes of the New Aesthetic has been our collaboration with technology, whether that’s bots, digital cameras or satellites (and whether that collaboration is conscious or unconscious), and a useful visual shorthand for that collaboration has been glitchy and pixelated imagery, a way of seeing that seems to reveal a blurring between “the real” and “the digital”, the physical and the virtual, the human and the machine."

Reading Simon "Retromania" Reynold's twitter feed the other day, I found this:

At first, I found it interesting, especially considering the follow-up blogpost by Reynolds which was basically a reaction to Bruce Sterling's essay about NA. In this short post, the author describes what can be the equivalent of NA in the audio department of material culture:

"what seems overtly, blatantly digital in today's pop -- to draw attention to its digital hyper-reality -- are all those AutoTune treatments and various other vocal-science effects (stutters, glitches, drastic pitchshifts from high to low) etc that you get routinely in chartpop in recent years-- that, and the general sheen of too-perfectness on both vocals (through AutoTune) and on the entire sonic-surface of songs -- a digi-gloss - there seems to be an attempt there, semi-unconscious most likely, to make music keep up with the high-definition crispness of flat-screen TV, CGI in film, skin-tone even-ness and other digital touching-up effects as used in glossy magazine photography and (i believe) also in TV and films."

This all good and well but I think this is the surface of things. As a result (and I do not want to imply that Reynold's wrong in there, I simply had the same thoughts), my impression is that this way of framing what is NA (regardless of the fact that NA is something *to be framed*) misses the point. As a matter of fact, what I find interesting with the New Aesthetic trope is not a focus on the way things look or sound, it's way beyond that. As James has put it on his humble tumblr about NA (i wanted to make this assonance for a while): "Since May 2011 I have been collecting material which points towards new ways of seeing the world, an echo of the society, technology, politics and people that co-produce them".

A good example, in the audio domain for once, of New Aesthetics as I find it interesting is the way the music experience is created, mediated and co-produced on a platform such as Soundcloud. Using it for some time, I am fascinated by the interface the user is provided with:

What strikes me as mesmerizing here, is the use of the spectrogram as the direct interface with musical content: not just an indicator on your screen to see the level of the sound... A machine-produced and machine-readable indicator is used to navigate in the track AND - and this is what I find intriguing - a mean to comment on specific part. Of course, that's curious IMHO for one reason: the practices that were common on the web (commenting/tagging/starring/linking) have basically circulated to something as common as a playing a musical track and turning it into a social object that people can comment on! What's next? Permalink for musical excerpt in a track? This example shows another category of NA that I find interesting. Perhaps the upcoming step is to find this kind of spectrogram with comments on concert poster or street graffiti but this is not the point. The main take-away is that the way we use things are changing and the things we are using too because of this co-production that Bridle described in the aforementioned quote.

Why do I blog this? This is maybe half-baked and confusing but I started accumulating material about creolization/recombination/hybridization, and I am curious to see if there a way to tie-in this with the NA meme. My impression is that there's a hidden variable in there: something that my friend Basile Zimmermann calls the circulation of cultural elements. More to follow later on. And of course, this seems to be related to the object-oriented ontology that Julian blogged about the other day. Let's read more about that.

Rotary dials as game controllers

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Working on the book about game controllers, I did some research about the first game peripherals. This is actually chapter 1... and one of the most intriguing example is certainly the existence of rotary dials. Potentiometers and knobs were of course the first lineages in terms of game controllers; think about Tennis for Two or Pong. Rotary dials are one step beyond as it introduces a sort of discrete interactions in the use of knobs... and of course they were employed to use video games. One of the earliest game (Noughts And Crosses) used a phone rotary dial but it was certainly more advanced later on in Japan with the rotary joysticks described on this website:

"as fun as rotary joysticks might have been at the time, in the end they failed to become more than a novelty control gimmick. So when the '90s kicked in with SNK dropping their trademark control scheme to go with their new multi-game NEO-GEO MVS system, and as better and more advanced shooting games were being released, rotary joysticks pretty much vanished into thin air from the arcade scene without anyone really noticing or caring. (...) The only real advantage of the rotary joysticks is that although they can only be pushed in the same 8 directions than the standard 8-WAY joysticks, they come with a special 12-WAY switch box that allows them to be rotated in 12 different positions, thus giving the player the ability to face and shoot in 4 additional directions not possible with the standard joysticks. Unfortunately, as great as this might sound on paper, in reality only very few games had actual 12-WAY support, and those that did, like it's the case of「BATTLE FIELD」and「CAL. 50」, only showcased how unnecessary the additional directions were gameplay-wise."

Why do I blog this? Working on the book leads to curious discoveries. I'd be happy to play Super Mario with a phone dial, if possible, perhaps that can be an intriguing research avenue for the laboratory. Of course it's more interesting to think about old school physical phone dials as opposed to the visual versions one can find on smartphones lately. On a different note, I am also fascinated by rotary dials and the way they subtly conveyed feedback to the users.

Vending machines and their cultural implications

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Yesterday, in a very small village in the French Alps, I ran across this fascinating bread vending machine. It made me think about other encounters with not-so-common machines such as a book delivery system in Seoul:

Or this pr0n vending machine in Torino:

And the camera/umberall combo in Bergen, Norway:

Why do I blog this? Looking at what is sold in vending machine is an interesting cultural indicator that it's always refreshening to observe. It says something about convenience and what is "acceptable" to be served by a non-humans.

In the French "bread" case, an naive observer would say that it's the end of the world and no French people wants its bread to be delivered in such a mechanized way. To these, I would say that: (1) The French are definitely used to this sort of weird machinery: pizza making devices on parking lots started to appear here and there, (2) It's not because it's a machine that the bread is bad. You can't see it in the picture above but the bread pieces are wrapped in typical french paper, and the presence of flour in the machine makes it certainly more baker-like.

In addition, the understanding of such devices is tightly related to contextual issues. You don't find these machines anywhere. The camera/umbrella one in Norway is present in a touristic area (where rain is sadly common), the porn machine is located in a gloomy suburb in Torino (where other forms of newspaper shops are absent or much too difficult to visit with this kind of literature), the bread machine is located in a place where shops are totally absent and it can be used by people form the neighborhood (as a dropping point).

Now, why is this important in a blog about interaction design? Simply because these machines are designed by people... who certainly need to understand human needs, contextual issues, technological constraints and business model problems. They seem blank and not interesting but I actually find them intriguing.

Joypad/lego hybridization

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Why do I blog this? This "Genesis Lego by Jomind" is a weird and curious hybridization of a standard controller (a Sega Genesis pad) and a combination of Lego bricks. I take it as an interesting example in the process of creolization, corresponding to the first steps.

Rigor and relevance in interaction design research

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Establishing Criteria of Rigor and Relevance in Interaction Design Research by Daniel Fallman and Erik Stolterman is a paper about the epistemological underpinnings of interaction design. It addresses the problem of ‘disciplinary anxiety’ that is often felt by people in this field and the inherent discussion about what constitutes ‘good research’ in terms of rigor and relevance. The author uses the following model, called the Interaction Design Research Triangle, to map out a two-dimensional space for plotting the position of a design research activity drawn up in between three extremes: design practice, design studies, and design exploration:

Some comments from the authors:

"The three forms of research do not randomly advocate certain research methods, techniques, or tools, instead they are a consequence of years of trial and error, practice, and experience, through and by which appropriate methods have emerged. The methods that have survived have been and are continuously tested against the purpose of the approach and they have thus proven over time to deliver the kind of results looked for in a way that makes sense. We therefore make the argument that the only way to discuss and examine rigor and relevance for interaction design research is to do it in relation to the three forms of research and to their particular purposes. (...) this is not done consistently in our field today. This sometimes leads to misunderstandings, confusion, and mistakes when design research papers and articles are reviewed, assessed, and evaluated. We argue that reviewers often come to apply the wrong notions of rigor and relevance to a particular research effort by not taking into consideration what form of research it is."

Why do I blog this? Currently writing a research project about the role of user research in interaction design, this kind of article is relevant to set the theoretical framework in the document I'm working on.

Multitasking TVs at the airport

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Stuck at the airport in Austin the other day, I couldn't help being fascinated by the three TVs in a café. Each of them was on a different program (news + sport 1 + sport 2) and the sounds of each channel was mixed with the background noise of the place (+ music). The different device sit there all day and broadcast their message continuously.

This situation did not prevent the avid users to follow what was going on at the time, especially because of the weird subtitles appearing right in the middle of the screen (with a certain delay):

"... at what's trending on the interwebs and social me..." says the CNN person.

Why do I blog this? Fascination towards the deluge of information appearing at 5am in a café, and by the "interface" tricks to let people grasp small bits from this.

How socialbots could influence changes in the social graph

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Socialbots: voices from the fronts, in the last issue of ACM interactions, is an interesting multi-author piece about how socialbots, programs that operate autonomously on social networking sites recombine relationships within those sites and how their use may influence relationships among people. The different stories highlighted here shows how "digitization drives botification" and that when socialbots become sufficiently sophisticated, numerous, and embedded within the human systems within which they operate, these automated scripts can significantly shape those human systems. The most intriguing piece is about a competition to explore how socialbots could influence changes in the social graph of a subnetwork on Twitter. Each team of participants were tasked to build software robots that would ingratiate themselves into a target network of 500 Twitter users by following and trying to prompt responses from those users. Some excerpts about the strategies employed:

"On tweak day we branched out in some new directions:

- Every so often James would send a random question to one of the 500 target users, explicitly ask for a follow from those that didn’t already follow back, or ask a nonfollowing user if James had done something to upset the target.

- Every time a target @replied to James, the bot would reply to them with a random, generic response, such as “right on baby!”, “lolariffic,” “sweet as,” or “hahahahah are you kidding me?” Any subsequent reply from a target would generate further random replies from the bot. James never immediately replied to any message, figuring that a delay of a couple of hours would help further explain the inevitable slight oddness of James’s replies. Some of the conversations reached a half-dozen exchanges. - James sent “Follow Friday” (#FF) messages to all of his followers but also sent messages to all of his followers with our invented #WTF “Wednesday to Follow” hash tag on Wednesday. James tweeted these

shoutouts on Wednesday/Friday New Zealand time so that it was still Tuesday/Thursday in America. The date differences generated a few questions about the date (and more points for our team)."

Why do I blog this? Because this kind of experiments can lead to informative insights about socialbots behavior and their cultural implications. The paper is a bit short about it but it would be good to know more about the results, people's reactions, etc. This discussion about software behavior is definitely an important topic to address when it comes to robots, much more than the ones about zoomorphic or humanoid shapes.

Cultural hybrid: chinese kebab

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Hybrid (chinese/turkish) Why do I blog this? The first time I encountered this weird signage taken in London (Shoreditch area), it struck me as a good example of cultural hybridization, certainly one of the first step of the creolization process I blogged about yesterday. Overall, it also reveals a sort of weird "new aesthetic".

Creolization

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The terms ‘Creole’ and ‘creolization’ are used in many different contexts and generally in an inconsistent way. It is instructive to start with the origins of the root word. It was probably derived from the Latin creara (‘created originally’)… The French transformed the word to ‘créole’… ‘Creole’ referred to something or someone that had foreign (normally metropolitan) origins and that had now become somewhat localised… To be a Creole is no longer a mimetic, derivative stance. Rather it describes a position interposed between two or more cultures, selectively appropriating some elements, rejecting others, and creating new possibilities that transgress and supersede parent cultures, which themselves are increasingly recognised as fluid.

— Robin Cohen, Creolization and Cultural Globalization: The Soft Sounds of Fugitive Power, Globalizations Vol. 4 (2) 2007

Why do I blog this? Some people wonder about the fact that we live in a perpetual present without the jetpacks, moonbases and virtual realities we were promised. This was actually the topic of the Lift 09 conference I co-organized. I'm more and more interested to uncover the the "alternative futures" to this, places where créolisation will play an important role. This is a new pet project for 2012 and I will file all the weak signals I collect about this under the category "creolization".

Drones controlled by Playstation-like joypads

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Just found this:

"And yet the US military does little to discourage the notion that this peculiar brand of long-distance warfare has a great deal in common with the video-gaming culture in which many young UAV operators have grown up. As one military robotics researcher tells Peter Singer, the author of Wired for War, “We modeled the controller after the PlayStation because that’s what these eighteen-, nineteen-year-old Marines have been playing with pretty much all of their lives.” And by now, of course, we also have video games that incorporate drones: technology imitating life that imitates technology."

Other similar instances of transferring video game controllers tot he military: PS2 pad to control mobile robots, missiles controlled by PS2 pad

Why do I blog this? material for the game controller project, examples showing how certain interfaces become a standard that can be transferred to other domains.

SXSW2012 talk about mind and consciousness as an interface

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Yesterday at SXSW Interactive 2012, Julian and myself participated in a panel about "mind and consciousness as an interface". We basically covered the whole spectrum from the cultural backdrop (science-fiction movies, reiki approaches) to current technologies involved in this. We also concluded about the interaction design issues and limits at stakes. See the slides below: [slideshare id=11971769&doc=2012-sxsw-brain-final-2-120312073507-phpapp01&type=d]

Mysteries and Curiosities map of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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Two weeks ago, when in California, Luke Johnson gave me this fantastic (and sort-of psychogeographic) map of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The project is called "Mysteries and Curiosities Map of JPL: How can design influence an established culture?" and it has been conducted by Luke and a bunch of other people.

As described by the website, "The map functions as a tool to orient new employees, encourage Lab explorating for current employees, and to put a human face on JPL for the outside public".

As described by Luke:

"For a place that depends on logic and reason, the Lab's layout is anything but. In fact, a running joke at JPL is that its employees need to use GPS to find their way around the Lab. For one, buildings have numbers instead of names. Secondly, buildings are ordered in the number in which they were funded, instead of by location. For example, Building 67 is perplexingly located between Buildings 238 and 138. 
Intrigued by this dichotomy and wanting to know more about JPL aside from the four walls of my cubicle, I came up with a plan. Armed with a GPS tracking device, camera, and a trusty pair of shoes, I walked to every building on Lab in numerical order. What I thought would take a Saturday afternoon took 22 hours over the span of four days at a walking distance of 52.2 miles. 
The resulting map is a reflection of this wacky experiment, research at the Lab's Beacon Library, and conversations with other JPL employees. The map itself is divided into two sections. The front is an Insider's Guide to JPL, containing information I wish someone had explained to me when I began working at the Lab."

Why do I blog this? Having been to CERN yesterday morning with the Lift12 speakers made me realize how such maps of big research facilities can be relevant as a way to not only describe spatial material but also stories and cultural content related to these intriguing places. Quite a nice project!

Some interfaces encountered in Los Angeles this week

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Few examples of technology/software-enabled spatiality encountered in Los Angeles last week: First, this marvelous dashboard from a Toyota Prius, an energy monitor that dynamically gives indications to the driver. As soon as I got into the taxi, I became fascinated by this visualization, it looks like a weird video-game (especially if you consider the joystick-shaped gear selector that has no real mechanical link to the car).

Then this Google map itinerary printed on paper, definitely a classic nowadays:

This miniature keyboard seen at the flea market in Pasadena is also curious... sitting here in a previously human-inhabited kiosk:

Being a great fan of pet toys, this mouse-controlled mouse is a definitely stunning invention. Not just because of the mouse recurrence, but also because designing artifacts for non-humans may be intriguing:

And finally, this gorgeous "singing rock" that we ran across in Calabasas is one of those little things that express the seemingly human need to control nature:

Why do I blog this? Of course there are plenty of other objects, but these different "interfaces" struck me as fascinating this time in California. Mostly because they have various spatial implications and that they're all somewhat recent.

Touch technologies in shared public toilets

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Towards Touch-Free Spaces: Sensors, Software and the Automatic Production of Shared Public Toilets by Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin is an essential read for anyone interested in how software-enabled technologies have implications at various spatial levels. In this case, it's about touching things with hands (pressing of buttons, pulling of handles, flicking switches, twisting selector dials), a relevant situation to understand the "nature of the recent automatic production of touch-free spatiality".

(Toilet interface in Geneva)

Some excerpts that fascinated me:

"in spite of the hype and some potential benefits from touch-free technologies for enhanced convenience and hygiene, their real world implementation is always imperfect. The incomplete deployment of sensors and software across the sequence of activities (including opening doors) means that toileting as a whole can never be rendered fully touch-free and the bathroom fails to become a completely automated code/space. (...) Touch-free technology is almost always implemented partially, and also partial in different ways, which can make for user frustration as one is uncertain about how bits of an unfamiliar bathroom are meant to work: ‘so where do I wave my hands to get some soap?’. (...) The danger is then that toileting is set to become an over-determined activity. Attempting to make avowedly simple activities touch-free with digital sensors and software algorithms is simply unnecessary it could be argued, and an excess of automation in the bathroom could be critiqued as an example of disciplining the body through ‘technological paternalism’ "

Why do I blog this? Being interested in the usage of digital technologies in various places as well as the implications of automation, this is a good example of how to explore a specific locus of interaction.

Structured curiosities: personal approach to design projects

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In California this week for a workshop at Nokia Design about location-based services. Today at lunch, I also gave a brownbag seminar about my approach to design/innovation projects. Here are the slides of the presentation:

[slideshare id=11572970&doc=2011-nokiadesign-brownbag-120214154307-phpapp02]

Why do I blog this? It was a good opportunity to finally step back and describe informally how I work, what I'm interested in and what kind of assumptions I have when carrying out projects (self-funded or with clients).

Interview (in French) at 36-15

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No, it's not a minitel service, it's just called 36-15, and it's a cool new podcast in French about digital innovation by Laurent ("L'émission qui se demande si le 21e siècle est une bonne idée"). Last week, I've been interviewed on my book about failures and it's located there on the infosphere.

Devices showing their inner selves

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I found this gem on the website of the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories:

"Meggy Jr RGB is a new kit that we designed as a platform to develop handheld pixel games. It's based around a fully addressable 8x8 RGB LED matrix display, and features six big fat buttons for comfy game play. (...) A unique feature of Meggy Jr RGB is that it is designed to be mounted inside a "handle set" -- a wooden or plastic case that's safer and more pleasant to hold than a bare circuit board. You can make, mod and customize your own handle sets to suit your taste-- These are like faceplates in that you can switch whenever you want to suit your mood or the game that you're playing, however different handle sets can radically change what the Meggy Jr looks and feels like. Above, you can see what our basic handles (left) look like, as compared to a set of custom smoke-colored batwing handles (right)."

And you can even make your own handle (or to have them fabbed) on platforms such as Ponoko or Pololu. I'd be curious to test it and see whether the interface itself is easy to play with, without a shell.

Why do I blog this? What fascinates me, beyond the fab/open platform, is the device aesthetic. That might be the equivalent of Centre George Pompidou (Beaubourg) for digital devices! Showing the internal guts of a technical apparatus is an intriguing approach that can be traced back to other architecture/industrial design traditions. It can be about making things visible and transparent to the users/people.

It also reminds me of this Mehmet Erkök’s Extreme Personalization phones. The phone shell, personalized in a very expressive way, can be seen as an interesting approach to customization:

"it’s not the strangeness of the work as much as their thinking process that counts"

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An interesting excerpt from the interaction12 day1 report by Johnny Holland about Antony Dunne's speech "Crafting Design Speculations":

"One audience member did ask the obvious question: where is the role for such out there work in everyday interaction design? His answer was that these students come from work and many return to the commercial field being employed by big corporations: it’s not the strangeness of the work as much as their thinking process that counts."

Why do I blog this? that's simply a good quote/answer to the question since it reflects the value of design.