An interesting superposition of sigmoid curves. Judging from the data about the internet and cell-phones, the data are not brand new, but it's interesting anyway to compare the various products:
Why do I blog this? compiling data for an upcoming book about recurring failures in innovation.
As usual, let's be cautious about such stats (methodologically speaking), to be compared to data by PEW.
"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed
or numbered! - My life is mine.
- Is it?"
Excerptfrom The Prisoner. Why do I blog this? great quote to be re-used later on.
One of the key problems of global knowledge concerns the circulation, adoption and adaptation of concepts in translation. The English word assemblage is gaining currency in the humanities and social sciences as a concept of knowledge, but its uses remain disparate and sometimes imprecise. Two factors contribute to the situation. First, the concept is normally understood to be derived from the French word agencement, as used in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (who, furthermore, do not use the French word assemblage in this way). Tracing the concept in its philosophical sense back to their texts, one discovers that it cannot easily be understood except in connection with the development of a complex of such concepts. Agencement implies specific connections with the other concepts. It is, in fact, the arrangement of these connections that gives the concepts their sense.
Why do I blog this? attempting to find a proper English word to express what Deleuze and Guattari meant by "agencement"...
Several pictures of a lovely electronic shop in neighborhood (Geneva). I just love the way the vitrine is decorated. Each moment of the year leads to specific artifacts and light. Each event (such as Michael Jackson's death on picture 6) leads to the addition of weird artifacts.
Why do I blog this? I take this as sort of "ballet of electronic devices in an highly slow motion". All of the artifacts presented there represent an interesting ecosystem of possibilities. A very Latour-ian perspective for Christmas.
And those who find it particularly funny might be those who’ve actually experienced both claims (booze wreaks havoc in their lives, but they also drink to ease their pain).
In fact much of what we find humorous can reveal our beliefs. Since laughter is typically an unconscious, automatic response it is a useful measure for laying bare individual biases.
This month in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior Robert Lynch of Rutgers University published the first scientific evidence for the conventional folk wisdom: it’s funny because it’s true. But Lynch is not referring to objective truth, rather what we think is true.
Why do I blog this? just thinking about the role of humor and how observational comedy can help to surface interesting insights about culture and human-technical objects relationships.
"The search for industrial inheritance" by nick foster is a super insightful talk presented at Interesting North 2010. It deals with the evolution of artifacts and the continuity of industrial innovation:
[slideshare id=5790491&doc=industrialinheritance-101115193829-phpapp01]
Why do I blog this? This material is very close to what we are addressing in the game controller project (as well as in my course series about interface evolution). The examples given (digital cameras in particular) are quite intriguing and it's pertinent to see the conclusion reached by the presenter (1. Be willing to launch a risky mutant, it may just succeed, 2. Make sure you make it genetically agile, 3. Have a think what its kids might be like).
Seven years ago, I wrote a short entry on this blog about seats arrangement in Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. I happened to pass by yesterday (en route for a seminar in the neighborhood) and the seats struck me as a fascinating assemblage to capture with my camera.
"A perfect arrangement for grooming"
The "we stand together" group
"Mom, Dad and a bored kid"
The lonely urban observer
The "hidden and lonely soldier"
The "unidirectional couple"
The "main group and the left-overs"
"Some of us are closer than the others"
Why do I blog this? To some extent, the pictures below shown below represent different arrangement... that reflect social configurations. The "movable" chairs from this park in Paris can be seen as an interesting example of the implicit "traces" people leave when undertaking very simple activities. It's definitely a good material to expand my thoughts about the social aspect of "urban traces". Along with the pictures above, I tried to infer some meaning (about social configurations); I might be wrong but the exercise is valuable in itself.
Readers interested in this kind of artifacts might have a look at "Seating arrangement and conversation" by Mehrabian and Diamond.
Why do I blog this? Looking for material for one of my student, I ran across this curious diagram recently and found it interesting. It's curious to see how a comic artist and theorist (Will Eisner) propose a way to describe embodiment in the language of comics. The body postures and gestures are important in comics and they definitely helps to convey meaning in the sequences, as shown by the quote by Eisner: "In comics, body posture and gesture occupy a position of primacy over text. The manner in which these images are employed modifies and defines the intended meaning of the words"
Critical Mass is a research agenda currently explored at Obuchi Lab in the University of Tokyo, Global 30 Architecture and Urbanism. The course is dedicated to the research on the emergence of global network society and its effect on architecture, urbanism and design culture. It is an interdisciplinary experimental design research connecting architecture, engineering and computations to theorize and to develop design proposals that negotiate the ever-changing contemporary built environments.
Why do I blog this? intriguing kind of flux visualization (circulation in a built environment) by Critical Mass.
As described by Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man creator:
"Well, there’s not much entertainment in a game of eating, so we decided to create enemies to inject a little excitement and tension. The player had to fight the enemies to get the food. And each of the enemies has its own character. The enemies are four little ghost-shaped monsters, each of them a different colour - blue, yellow, pink and red. I used four different colours mostly to please the women who play - I thought they would like the pretty colours.
The brief encounter with this real-world Pacman in Geneva (made by Bufalino Benedetto & Benoît Deseille for the "Arbres et Lumières festival) was particularly curious in conjunction with this insightful short paper called "Why do Pinky and Inky have different behaviors when Pac-Man is facing up?" by Don Hodges:
"In the videogame Pac-Man (and in many of its sequels and clones), it has been previously established that the ghosts, Pinky and Inky, track Pac-Man by examining the direction he is facing and use that information as part of their determination of their respective targets. For example, Pinky usually targets the location four tiles in front of Pac-Man's location. However, if Pac-Man is facing up, this location becomes four up and four to the left of Pac-Man's location. Inky has a similar change in his targeting when Pac-Man is facing up. Why do Pinky and Inky have different behaviors when Pac-Man is facing up?
The short answer is, in my opinion, because of a programming bug. Here is the evidence."
Why do I blog this? I find it interesting to think about the Pacman ghosts algorithms, especially in the context of real-world Pacman instantiations... and how it would apply to other kinds of actors (humans/non-humans) in the physical environment.
... is a new side-project of mine. It basically consists in the articulation between two sources of insights about the urban environment:
My aim was to select quotes and pictures so that a peculiar kind of relationship emerges out of the juxtaposition. To some extent, this articulation between the two elements could be seen as some vague correlation: sometime there is indeed a cause-and-effect relationship (the quote exemplifies a certain trend that has influenced the architecture of the building represented on the picture), sometimes there isn't. The idea is to show that some notions, paradigms and system thinking either shaped urbanism or provided a certain framework/cultural Zeitgeist which led to the shapes and representations depicted on the B&W pics.
This is a work-in-progress thing. I guess some assemblage are better than others of course. Let's see how things unfold, I'll try to keep this going and select the best juxtapositions in a booklet once I have a certain quantity of material. My perception of this is simply that some patterns and categories will emerge at some point and perhaps a narrative could be constructed at some point.
As usual here, comments are welcome.
Is it worth it? Many of the problems that the internet of things is supposed to solve actually have simple, non-technological solutions. Google likes to boast that your smartphone can tell you the ratio of men and women in any given bar. But there is actually a much simpler solution: you can look through the window! Many of the wonders of the internet of things fall into this category. Sensors can tell you when a baby's nappy is full. There is a perfectly reasonable old-fashioned solution to this problem. Sensors can turn the stem of an umbrella to glow blue when it is about to rain. You can always listen to the weather forecast. Mr Kvedar argued that hooking people up to the internet would reduce their need to go to the doctor, because they will be constantly updated about their health. But will elderly people, who are nervous enough about mobile phones, really embrace this high-tech wonderland? It might be better to loosen the grip of professional doctors on medical advice, and allow nurse-practitioners and other para-professionals to monitor people's health. In health care, above all else, technology is a poor substitute for the human touch.
Why do I blog this? this is the excerpt that struck me as interesting in the Economist but the whole article adopts a fresh perspective (especially in this kind of press). I do not necessarily agree with all the arguments here but it's relevant to see how people ponder the IOT.
There has been an especially noteworthy change in the posture of European and American readers. Until now, my novels could be seen in 20th-century terms, that is, to be entering their minds through such doorways as “post-modernism” or “magic realism” or “Orientalism”; but from around the time that people welcomed the new century, they gradually began to remove the framework of such “isms” and accept the worlds of my stories more nearly as-is. I had a strong sense of this shift whenever I visited Europe and America. It seemed to me that people were accepting my stories in toto — stories that are chaotic in many cases, missing logicality at times, and in which the composition of reality has been rearranged. Rather than analyzing the chaos within my stories, they seem to have begun conceiving a new interest in the very task of how best to take them in.
By contrast, general readers in Asian countries never had any need for the doorway of literary theory when they read my fiction. Most Asian people who took it upon themselves to read my works apparently accepted the stories I wrote as relatively “natural” from the outset. First came the acceptance, and then (if necessary) came the analysis. In most cases in the West, however, with some variation, the logical parsing came before the acceptance. Such differences between East and West, however, appear to be fading with the passing years as each influences the other.
In my latest novel, 1Q84, I depict not George Orwell’s near future but the opposite— the near past — of 1984. What if there were a diffe- rent 1984, not the original 1984 we know, but another, transformed 1984? And what if we were suddenly thrown into such a world? There would be, of course, a groping toward a new reality.
Why do I blog this? these curious excerpts are interesting IMO both in terms of creative process and speculation. Something to be connected with the design fiction meme.
This key I've been using for few weeks reveals an interesting assemblage: a tiny LCD display inserted in the key. Some observations:
Why do I blog this? I am fascinated by doors and the use of various technologies in door control. In this case, we have two curious ingredients of recent technologies: networked objects (this might very well be the "door case" for the Internet of Things) and a tiny display (much subtler than the so-called "urban screens").
With this kind of assemblage, the level of delegation left to the door is even more important than what it used to be. This is surely of interest in conjunction to Bruno Latour's work on this topic (see my blogpost). Opening a door is not that simple and would leave more traces than previous version of doors. As a side note, it's also interesting to contrast this version to automatic doors in train/public space/etc. In the former case, the necessity to control who opens what (in an office environment) seems to make it necessary to use this solution (before retinal scan?).
"What surrounds us? More than what we can see, touch, and feel. Beyond atmosphere, particular and solid matter, our bodies encounter many forms of invisible radiation: electromagnetic, wifi, gsm, audio and white noise. The Invisible Forces project provides a framework for the measurement and spatial mapping of radiation. "
Why do I blog this? yet another interesting example of mapping "invisible" waves.
At Lift 2011 in Geneva (yes we do have a new website) we will feature various speeches about game design, gameification and transmedia approaches. Video games have long escaped the realm of nerdy teenagers to become one of the most important cultural product of our time - ahead of cinema and music. Now we hear our life will be "gamified", with many of the mechanisms invented in games showing up to our "real life". Is this really happening? What are the real possibilities and pitfalls of such a proposition? We will also talk about how games can be used to engage people into an activity like reading, and discuss the implications of transmedia approaches. We’re going to have 3 speakers about these topics:
Last week, I organized a Lift seminar at Imaginove in Lyon, France. The focus was on user participation and user-generated content in digital industries. The idea was to give attendants an overview of the field, to address recent evolutions and possible futures. Given that I think it's important to have a transversal approach, I invited three persons from different fields. We had Florence Devouard (Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board member, consultant at Anthere Consulting), Sabine Dufaux (independent Digital Strategist) and Alexis Lang (game designer at AtOnce technologies). The idea was to understand the implications of user-generated content with 3 cases: the Wikipedia, the role of UGC for brands and how the video game industry look at UGC. The Wikipedia case
Florence Devouard started off with a description of the Wikipedia case. More specifically, her presentation focused on the evolution of participation on Wikipedia, as well as the motivation users have to be engaged in this project.
Understanding usage pattern on Wikipedia is not that easy because people do not necessarily log in (and when they do they use a nickname), they may contribute with different nicknames, sometimes contributions are anonymous and sometimes handled by bots (correction, etc.). Moreover, most of the studies that has been carried out focused on the anglophone wikipedia, which does not account for cultural differences.
That being said, some lessons can be drawn:
Interestingly, as shown by the graphs above, the the number of active and very active contributors (those making 5+ edits in a month) peaks after 5–6 years, around 2007 on the anglophone Wikipedia. The reason for this might be that: (1) a sentiment that there's already a lot of content (and hence participation can be more focused on small corrections), (2) the community is less welcoming for newcomers, (3) technical difficulties to editing (and the mediawiki technology is a bit old), (4) social networks put a lot of competitive pressure (in terms of on-line attention from users). That being said, there are clearly some success factors: a clear and engaging vision, a low barrier to participation, good incentives to participation (people are happy to exchange, rewards on user pages, etc.) and a functional governance.
Brands and UGC
Sabine Dufaux (see her slides) followed up on this with a different angle. She address the relevance of user-generated content for brands and the way they communicate. Sabine showed that technological and social conditions are now good enough to provide an abundance of content and participation. These conditions enable a dynamic and collaborative model for which there's a social gain for people in participating, a virtuous circle of some sort.
Sabine also showed that there's a need to go beyond the 1-90-100 law of participation by pointing the "participation ladder" described by Forrester Research:
For brands, this is important and as much as 25% of the content of brands are made of UGC. Technology converted part of the "spectators" into users, which in turn can prescript products and services (only 14% of consumers trust ads, 78% trust recommendations from friends and family). However, ad men seem to have a love and hate relationship with UGC. They know it can lead to success and consumers' engagement but they fear the inherent loss of control. The advantage for brands are clear: create a relationship with people, develop a certain proximity, favor adhesion and recommendation, etc. The risk to loose control is there but it was already present beforehand.
What's interesting is that design can produce gaps and holes that people can fill. These gaps can lead to new form of dialogues between companies and the users of their products.
UGC in the video game industry
Based on various examples from the Role-Playing Game field, Alexis Lang showed first that user-generated has already been there for a while, without technology. RPG were based on a simple pyramid of participation with pros at the top (writers, cartoonists), game masters (who created their own scenarios), players (who created a character and "play" it) and readers/spectators. Content circulated between these different actors and sometimes got published in books, fanzines and magazines.
The advent of the digital media led to other forms of participations in video games: MUDs, level editors (Starcraft + FPS), games such as Little Big Planet or Lego MMO. The new forms of pervasive and location-based games also offer interesting possibilities in terms of user creation. See for example platforms such as Hidden Park, GPS mission or SCVNGR.
Alexis is interesting in how to go beyond these examples and how a relevant narrative can be co-created by a crowd of players (like encyclopedia with Wikipedia). His current project (called "project c") is about designing a collaborative storytelling platform by using design gaps are source of creativity (and narratives). The obvious problem here is both to keep a certain level of quality and coherence. In his project, the history if a jigsaw puzzles: virtual objects (in the form of narrative bits) have to be collected and assembled... and the user-generated content lies in the holes that people have to fill and speculate about (by creating hypotheses).
Why do I blog this? These 3 perspectives are highly insightful. It's curious to see how such a focused topic can be addressed with a different vocabulary and distinct perspectives. However, there are clearly some common trends:
Thanks again to the three participants!
Via marketsentinel.com:
My primary output is analysis of how new technology users are living at the intersection of macro processes. Examples of questions that I ask are: What does the future of the internet look like? What happens when the next 300 million migrants with digital tools are able to get online? How will the state, the world, and technological infrastructures accommodate such a massive change in scale? How do we design and market to this group?
I hang out with people and spend a lot of time trying to see the world through their eyes. I make long and deep observations of how everyday life is achieved and negotiated. I then interpret my observations and contextualize my analysis in relation to past, current and future socioeconomic, technological and cultural developments.
By answering these questions I am able to provide context and explanations for why people engage or don’t engage with certain technologies, to explain how this all interfaces with historical and present day life, and how designers, engineers, and organizers can meet the daily needs of both low-income/marginalized users and the burgeoning middle class.
People want to know how new users engage with their devices, how they access information, and why their tech behaviors are so different from Western consumers and contexts. Companies and entrepreneurs really want to understand what’s going on. They want to know why the Chinese don’t use Google Apps or why paid music services haven’t taken off there. They enter these communities with lots of market data about their interests but without a deep understanding of their context.
There was (and still is) this expectation that every region’s historical arch would just all of sudden parallel the history of the internet as used in the West. But it doesn’t work like that. The internet was (and still is) introduced in different ways in each country.
Why do I blog this? Following her work for some time, I find interesting the way she described her approach (ethnography contextualized with broader perspectives) and how she applies it to cultural differences in technology usage.
TASSIMO is not just a coffee maker, it’s a Brewbot, an advanced brewing system made by the engineers at Bosch. The Brewbot is programmed to make seven different beverages at the touch of a button. That’s because Brewbot uses T DISCs, which are
single-serve discs packed with a variety of coffees, teas and hot chocolates. The Brewbot reads the barcode found on each T DISC to know exactly what to make and how to brew it.
It’s this technology that distinguishes the TASSIMO Brewbot from regular brewers and guarantees a perfect cup of whatever you're in the mood for every time.
Why do I blog this? I started collecting how internet of things technologies now pervade kitchen appliances.
