Category: Live Blogging

When I go to a conference, I usually take notes. Here they are.

Lift09 — Matt Webb — Scientific Fiction and Design [en]

Book: Cusp, Robert A. Metzger. SF *(steph-note: sounds like a crazy story, need to read it!)*

This is not the SF we’re talking about here. No flying cars, silver skullcaps… Here: Scientific Fiction (World War Z — zombie story; the book unfolds, and “it makes sense”). This is what Matt wants to talk about — this kind of book.

Taking pleasure in watching things unfold. (Shows us videos of marbles in “mazes”.) Human nature: it’s almost compulsive, we want to watch things happen.

The impossible triangle: Human nature, Society, Things. How do SF stories read through this triangle? One thing changes, other things have to change too.

Cf law of perfect gasses, linking pressure, volume, temperature. Linked. SF is walking the landscape of possible future worlds.

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Problem? inventing, imagining the future: hard.

Which products work in the landscapes of possible worlds? Discover it through:

– market research
– economics
– evolution (start with something that you know works, and change it very slowly)

*steph-note: making good note of this for my fiction writing*

In the process of invention: prototypes. Process?

Middle of the paper, draw your new invented radio. At the corners, contexts => you evolve your radio, create hybrids, cross-breeds. *steph-note: some kind of visual/drawing braingstorming!* Matt: not a storming, random process. It’s very methodical, process of deconstruction. What emerges is the discovery of what it is about that original radio that persists.

The process continues to physical objects.

History: the past is another set of possible worlds, just like the future. One process of fictionalizing these worlds is to change one important event *(steph-note: didn’t get the term for that… counter-fractures??)* — What if Kennedy wasn’t shot? What if the war of Independance had been lost?

Prototype phone for Nokia, made of metal that melts at 47°C. Good for redoing it, but don’t keep it too close to your ear (contains lead ;-))

Materials. Soft furry phone. Soft on your face, and can stroke it when on the table. Hair you have to tie up to see the screen. Patchwork phones.

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“Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.” Victor Papanek

Scientific Fiction:

The story is the laboratory. Reading is your research. Writing is your experiment.

*steph-note: this is giving me food for thought, about my difficulties in creating stories and worlds and my incapacity to design anything graphically.*

Lift09 — Sarah Marquis [fr]

*Laurent: extraordinary stand-in speaker Sarah Marquis, an adventurer who goes off for months on end, walking across Australia for example.*

Est-il possible aujourd’hui d’imaginer se retrouver dans la nature sans aide technologique? On est des mammifères après tout. Pas d’électricité, d’eau, de nourriture? Avec des habits quand même…

Sarah a décidé de faire ce pas… retrouver des instincts d’animal, en sorte. Elle a fait le tour de l’Australie, 17 mois de marche.

Comment fait-on un voyage comme ça? Avec les pieds, d’abord, mais surtout dans la tête.

Difficulté: eau et nourriture… On n’a pas appris à chasser le lézard! Il faut devenir le lézard pour le chasser, le comprendre. Eau à travers la sudation des arbres.

Gérer sa propre consommation d’eau. Respirer que par le nez pour éviter de perdre de l’eau. Marcher de nuit. Survie. Conditions animales. C’est rassurant à quelque part de voir à quel point on est animal.

Sarah n’est pas sur Facebook… envie d’un retour à la terre. Retrouver la source de la vie.

Pendant le voyage il arrive des tas de choses. Raconte comment elle a “adopté” Joe — elle a volé le chien au fermier qui allait l’abattre. Chien qui l’a accompagnée et vit maintenant se retraite bien méritée à Verbier avec elle.

Technologie? Une appareil photo et un enregistreur vidéo. GPS pour retrouver son frère pour les points de ravitaillement (7 paires de chaussures).

Sarah avait pris 15kg avant de partir, histoire d’avoir des réserves. Le corps s’use, aussi. Il s’adapte à l’effort. Sac à dos de 30kg!

Rencontre avec des aborigènes. A passé un peu de temps avec eux. La chasse: une des femmes aborigènes attrape une proie à la main (le choc! comment elle a fait?)

Se déconnecter.

Deux ans plus tard, repartie en Amérique du Sud. 8 mois de marche. Le froid. Seul repère: monter. C’est important d’avoir des repères. Peut-on trouver ce qui va nous combler dans le monde actuel, là où on le cherche?

Sans ressources d’énergie, on peut en tant qu’être humain bipède, se retrouver dans un élément inconnu et survivre.

Chose intéressante: retour à la civilisation après 17 mois dans un pays désert et hostile… Quand on survit on vit au jour le jour — comment préparer l’arrivée? Dans les 300 dernier mètres seulement, Sarah réalise que le lendemain, c’est le retour à la civilisation, qu’elle va ouvrir son frigo, pouvoir prendre un bain…

Lift09 — Envisioning the Future City — Anne Galloway [en]

Expectations, promises and hopes are things that we do.

Anne looks at what people do, make, say. Tries to figure out why we don’t do, make, say other things.

To make certain futures happen: broken relationships between certain groups of people.

*steph-note: missing a lot here, having trouble seeing where we’re going*

So, city of the future. Hybrid cities, real-time, sensor, read-write, mobile, adaptive… cities.

Attention: not to ignore what’s happening now.

“What if we imagine the future city as a gift we want to give people.” Through all these projects, everybody had the best of intentions. Want to give people good things. Make lives better. In five years, Anne has never talked to anyone who has anything but good intentions. The people who do make things want to give people good things.

Gifts are powerful. Show that we love, care, or have obligations to each other. Different gifts for different people. Usually put energy in choosing gifts for some people — but not all of them.

Even the good intentions end up being a little off sometimes. Superhero superpowers. Example of Superuseless Superpower: Lati-dude and Longi-dude. Transport yourself to the same point on the other side of the earth. (haha!)

Gifting is a tricky business. there is always some tension at some point. Some people are better at it than others (giving and receiving gifts well).

So, what does it mean to give people new cities or technologies? What is the gift doing?

What is the relationship between the gifter and the “user”? What can we expect of the other? Eg. gifts between colleages at X-mas, we have different expectations than from family, lovers, grandparents.

When we give someone a gift, how do we even know they want it? Could a gift be damaging? cause stress, upset, anger? How do you know if they appreciate it? (“thank you very much, that’s a lovely gift”) What do you do if they dislike it? How do you act if they misuse it? (the project has failed…)

Did you ever get a gift that you didn’t use? Or “what in god’s name do you think of me to give me this?” (Head-massaging helmet… “everyone likes a good head massage!” => you become an anomaly.)

“Oh, it’s not so difficult, let me show you how it works!! It wasn’t meant to make you feel stupid!”

Until you get into the process, you have no idea how to interact.

Back to the gifted city. Gifted in the superhero sense: look, it can do all that!!!

Examples of future cities we’ve seen: many people in the room probably went “oh cool!”, but certainly some also went “cool, but what am i going to do with it?”

We gift opportunities with these cities. Citizen engagement projects. Data to take political action. New technologies => act in new ways.

Projects which allow people to map environmental issues.

But not everyone wants to be a data collector, or cares about the data. Many kinds of publics. Not everyone will be interested in doing certain parts of the “job”. Public science: challenge = getting people to do science work, sometimes people don’t want to be scientists, not interested in the labour, or lack the capacity to do it.

=> fragmented public. The gift needs us to want to act as data collectors and it needs us to have the ability to make sense of the data we collect.

Gifted risks. With these expectations etc, we can start thinking of the risks associated to those gifts. If citizenship requires technology, non-techies start feeling like non-citizens. Not everyone has a cellphone! Lots of people share cellphones! Or own multiple mobile phones… Locking out people…

Giving access to information that people didn’t use to have. They still don’t usually have the possibility to generate certain sets of data. Someone has decided what will be sensed (what the sensors capture). Assumption, also, that scientific data is more important/true than other emotional, affective, subjective… data.

When you’re building the future city:

– What kind of future city do you hope to give?
– What kind of future city do you expect to receive?

Without asking those questions, risks much higher than possible opportunities.

Lift09 — Dan Hill — Soft Infrastructure Superpowers [en]

Has been travelling since Monday, arrived from Australia 3 hours ago. Poor Dan!

How to re-route 400 passengers?

Soft infrastructure, bits of paper with numbers on. In Hong Kong, malfunctioning aircrafts *(steph-note: not sure I’m understanding all this.)*

Hotel Smart Card keys not working (soft infrastructure fail #59)

=> no matter how good the hard infrastructure is, it’s the soft infrastructure fails that define the experience.

Soft infrastructure:

– interaction design
– software design
– information architecture
– service design
– urban design
– urban informatics

And…

– business models
– legal and political context
– belief systems
– social and cultural fabric

Infrastructure futures…?

In 1939: the “green new city” in the forest (understandable, industrial cities at the time were pretty horrific). Scaling the city from how far you can travel on foot, to tram, train, car…

1966, “New Movement in Cities”

*(steph-note: missed a bit here, I think my brain needed a rest)*

Map showing the shape of wifi around a building (wow).

Projecting the inside of a building on the outside (what’s going on in there? how full is it?)

Lift09 — Future Cities — Carlo Ratti [en]

We are headed for the death of cities. In 2008, half the world population is living in cities.

mapping = complexity to simplicity

How do we make sense of all these digital representations of physical spaces? Bunch of projects.

(haha! the cyborg’s primary tool is the iPhone ;-))

Represent the map of the city in a different way. Map of cellphone activity in Rome around the World Cup Finals.

Concentration of pedestrians (difficult in Rome, because you usually use velocity to identify pedestrians, and pedestrians often move faster than vehicles!)

Barcelona, photos on Flickr.

View density of pictures taken in various places. (Florence for example.) Patterns of movement of Italians vs. Americans in Italy.

Map of Barcelona which shows pictures from Flickr streaming out of it, over time (video map). Filter by tag. Paralells between geography of brits and parties in Barcelona 😉

New York 2008

New York talk exchange. Who is NY talking to? Spinning globe showing phone calls as threads linking two places. Over time, too. Beautiful!

Zoom and see what parts of the city are calling what parts of the world. Information on the composition of those areas.

Zaragoza 2008

*steph-note: tuned out during that one, sorry. Something about an info box at the expo, water on the roof and running down the sides, and a roof which collapses to the ground — better run out fast!*

Other projects: GreenWheel — on a bike, capture energy while you’re braking. Copenhagen citybike. Smart tags to see where your garbage goes (awareness! Wall-E!) Put tags in the trash in NY and then follow it.

Lift09 — Florence Devouard — Update on Wikimedia Foundation [en]

At the start, was difficult for the foundation (not enough money, etc).

During the last couple of years, has stabilized a lot — much better situation.  25 staff members, 350 servers, 8mio dollars budget, audited and located in San Francisco.

Nearly 25 local organizations involved. Got a grant to improve usability. Also a sum of money from the Mozilla Foundation for something around pushing video formats.

Wikipedia

  • 250 languages
  • 11 mio articles
  • 200 000 articles for 12 languages

Gone mainstream, so more vandalism

  • bots who track “deceased” or words like that… annoying when people are announced dead and they aren’t, even if it’s for a few minutes
  • flagged revisions: the visitor knows whether the page has been reviewed or is a “draft”; tested on the German wikipedia (there can be upto 21 days of backlog, bringing it down to 7 days). There is discussion to use the same system for the English wikipedia (roughly 60% in favour).
  • approved wikipedians can “rate” articles

Wikisource: online archives

Idea: put an image of the book on part of a page, and the text opposite, so that the digitized version can be checked.

Wikibooks

You can create your own book. Define title, chapters, using content from wikipedia.

Wikimedia commons and images

media repository created in 2004 => order posters of images in wikimedia commons (WikiPosters) — available initially in France.

Lift09 — Ramesh Srinivasan — Cultural Futures [en]

What would a diverse digital world/web look like?

How is the web impacting the world?

Design exposed Ramesh to questions of culture. *(steph-note: I think this is a very good point/thing.)*

Put technology in the hands of *people*: things happen. Used in a different way and in a different context than what they were planned for.

Cultures understand how to take technologies to use them in ways that best benefit them.

Usability tends to push us towards thinking that there are specific uses for the technology, and we design them for those uses. But out there in the wild, other uses appear.

Example: Native American communities in Southern California, spread across reservations, connected through wifi.

Rethinking the museum. Piece of pottery — viewed by Zunis through stories, uses, rather than characteristics. Intersection between what the Zuni say about the piece of pottery, and the museum.

Video camera in villages in Andhra Pradesh. People seeing themselves in different ways.

=> comparative study Ramesh ran. 2 villages, similar demographics. “Create videos” around their everyday lives.

What happens? specially in an environment where 80% of the villagers are illiterate?

Power of choice. Characteristics of illiterate societies (very ritualized). When they start creating videos, some kind of literacy settles in. They’d take videos of things in the communities that were wrong, and send it to the government. Social action. Posted on YouTube, even!

What happened?

Mobility, dissemination, social capital, dialogue outside the focus group, confronting ritualization by interrupting everyday life.

Taking it to Policy. Scale vs. The Local.

How do policy-makers view the world? Example, waterlogging (monsoon). Hundreds of terms in people’s vocabulary for that, but only one for those complaints on a policy level.

Public Grievance & Redressal website

Where to start? tagging to overcome ontology issues, for example.

Two main issues:

a) how do we develop web systems that actually show controversy (wikipedia doesn’t really show that, for example *steph-note: except in talk pages*)

b) search: information has moved from “in your mind” to “what you can find = Google”. Google’s algorithm is based on a certain idea of how things should be found. eg search for Africa — head over to page 3 at least to find the first page *produced* by/in Africa… that says something! How do we show different ways of solving a problem?

Lift09 — Change — Yeong Roh [en]

Arts: helps her think about herself. Shift of mode from previous speakers. More reflective.

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Change what, and how? and what should we change?

Start with changing our outlook or perspective of ourselves.

I Ching. Book of change. 2800 BC.

Author accused of being a North Korean spy.

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Word for “open up and make connections” = “connect all the way from the earth to the heavens”

Who do we think we are?

4 Dimensions of existence according to Ken Wilber:

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Levels of Consciousness: Senses — Cognition, science — Understanding, culture, values — Spirituality.

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Lift09 – David Rose – How Fiction Shapes the Future [en]

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Persistant needs/wishes fantasies:

  • to know
  • to communicate
  • to heal
  • to protect
  • to create
  • for mobility

Inspirations for where to advance.

Know

To know the truth. Invention and fiction.

  • Marsden (?): here were no cultural icons representing strong women => WonderWoman, with lasso of truth. In its snare, you have to tell the truth.
  • Snow White: mirror mirror on the wall…
  • Conlin: Alexander Crystal seer.
  • Wizard of Oz.

Single pixel browser. Orb. Ambient objects: between push and pull. Skiing conditions, gardening, weather forecast…

Watches are a pretty mature object, but angular perception is not very ambient. (steph-note: I think I may have got that wrong, lots of examples of angular displacement devices.)

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Fridges are a great place to diplay stuff. They’re already expensive, so easy to add an extra screen or something.

Exposing customers to energy prices flattens the demand curve.

Showing us a device with proximity sensor: from far away you see the cross-room view of the weather forecast, and as you get closer, you see more detailed views. (steph-note: wow!)

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Communicate

Photo frame with presence sensor, and squeeze sensor.

Internet-connected pillcap. Ordering refills. Escalating alerts to take the pills. Share on facebook (I’m on something and I’m doing well). Rewards! Medical records!

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Protection

Phasers on stun on Star Trek. Exploring brave new worlds without harming anyone.

Ambient umbrella!!

Create

Robots would give you time to be creative. Roomba!

Painting with a digital brush that picks up color from your environment! (great video)

Guitar Hero.

Mobility

Flying carpet. Drive in the smart lane, GPS. Marauder’s Map = GPS combined with Google Latitude. Tracking busses in SF.

Lift09 — Change — Nicolas Nova — The Recurring Failure of Holy Grails [en]

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Videophone 1969 — so expensive that nobody could use it.

The Intelligent Fridge 1996

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Location-based services 1993 — a success in terms of communication, but not in terms of where people are *(steph-note: not sure I got that right)* — Google Latitude, but problems for privacy reasons. Not that simple.

Common characteristics:

– overoptimism
– reinvention of the wheel
– ignoring similar attempts

Issues:

– Trapped in the zeitgeist (designers, researches, engineers).
– Time is not stable. Innovations happen slowly.
– Short term, long term
– bad understanding of “users”
– the “average human” myth

Automating rituals (Where are you? Smart fridge that does the shopping.)

Virtual assistants in MS Office. Idea: technology should be more “natural”. Making things “natural” is difficult: what is natural, and how can technology really replicate it?

What is “natural” shifts over time. Eg. swiping travel cards that are in bags in the subway: natural for the people who are used to do it, but not for those who have never been in the subway. It’s difficult to define.

So, why is it important to explore failures?

Many failures are actually good ideas before their time. Failures can indicate possible futures to explore. More detailed critique. Source for design (Apple certainly learned a lot for the iPhone from their Newton failure).

It’s important to spot failures, there is a need to document them and turn them into a design strategy.