Tag: lift conference

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Julien Dorra’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

Being together in the same space. But let’s first talk about cyberspace! Looking for papers in the office and we wish we had the “search” feature to find them. Cyberspace is fun, engaging, we learn, etc., most of our time spent in cyberspace.

Meetings are boring, brainstormings fail to innovate, and conferences… we can’t bridge the gap when we go back to work.

University: students on computers, and facebook is always more interesting than class.

In 2009, involved in drupal community in France. Dev sprints. Offline, around a table. In an office. Set a bunch of goals and work on it together. A week, three days… depends.

“Sprint” is not a good word, it’s more a way to be out of the day-to-day flow and concentrate on the product. “What, you’re going to Paris for a whole week, not see the Louvre, and look at a computer 12 hours a day?”

Accelerates the project! Meatspace gives you unlimited bandwidth.

Sprints: self-organizing, physical location is irrelevant, workflow is not formatted. Only developers!

A few weeks later, Julien participated in the first startup week-end Paris.

From the outside, looks like a sprint. But…

• it’s a local event (locality is important)
• variety of communities represented
• the format is also designed.

Learning is the key goal here, the output is not that important.

Now, let’s focus on the output: Artgame Week-end. Produce a usable game in 48 hours, with participation of artists.

People are not always open to this kind of event: “I need a developer. Will I be ensured I’ll work on my project?” Exploratory, diversity of participants, focus on the output.

Artgame week-end impacted mainly the online world and didn’t really reach out of Paris.

Reaching beyond innovations: Museomix. Implement ideas of digital integration directly in the museum. Needed to take place in the museum. You have to design for the place. Strict process in terms of output. At first, museum people very skeptic regarding the output. But now, 5 projects the museum is actively seeking funding for. Now there is a community of museumx-ers. 70 participants but many more in the community.

Wide inclusion, tangible output and impact, remix of a museum. Had to move things around in the museum, not simple!

Different approaches to the place, the community, the output in these four types of events.

Back to the 20th century. Strong historic taboo against this type of event.

20th century, factury is optimum organization. Worker-machine. Information flow is maybe top-down, but nobody needed to know what the neighbour was doing.

Now we’re hyperconnected to everybody, we know what others are doing, and that the factory is not the optimum model anymore. The spring principle applies to many different domains (sprint !== rush).

Serial collaborators are people able to contribute to any type of event. Diverse skills and talents give you stronger, richer output.

steph-note: this is making me want to participate in one of these events… maybe the next startup week-end here?

Don’t set up an event and try and build a community. Reach into your existing communities and then build events for them.

Interesting: had people from other museums coming to work for museumx!

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Ben Bashford’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

Designing machines with empathy. Cable TV box: ask it to do something, doesn’t do it. Ask again, still doesn’t do it. Asks it to do something else, then tries to do all three things at the same time.

Interactions with computers and new media are fundamentally social. Let’s assume for this talk that computers = people. And “has a processor” = computer.

What do you get when you cross an airplane with a computer? A computer! Once you put a processor in something it stops being what it was before and starts being a computer. (Book: The Inmates are Running the Asylum.)

Nest: sets your central heating according to data found online.

Izon camera sits quietly in your house and captures video when it’s disturbed and posts it online.

Wristband that helps you turn your exercise routine into a game. Scales that track your weight by connecting with your iPhone. (Withings.)

Retailers don’t know what to do with these things. Classified in “miscellaneous”.

Computers = people = everywhere. Getting cheaper, they’re soon going to be talking back to us. Conversational UI. Vision is getting cheaper (XBOX 360). They’ll know when we’re looking at them and adjust their behaviour accordingly 😉

Ben doesn’t think “robot” fits for these things, and “bot” kind of stops at software.

It’s not about what they’re doing but how they do it.

Mint floor cleaner. Amazon review: “personality of the bot is OK. not quite as chipper as the other cleaning jobs but gets the job done”. Interpreting behaviour as personality. Interesting!

So… what are you designing? It’s going to be read as personality, shouldn’t be left to engineering.

Who is this? what does it want? How does it feel about it?

Problem: anthropomorphism => uncanny valley.

Canny Basecamp. Minimal viable person. Messenger app icons. Tower Bridge calmly referring to itself in the first person.

Pixar “lamps” — the moment they start moving they have personalities and emotions.

Macbook pulsating light: breathing speed for normal sleeping human.

Computer can’t do real random().

Zoomorphism.

Technology should create calm. What about a computer that keeps asking for your attention? Talk to me, look at me, help me. Cute.

Plants = ambient displays. Robotany?

The more plants you get together, the calmer it gets.

Skeumorphism. Make new stuff in the form of the old to minimise future shock. Book metaphor for iPad books. Has pages that turn.

Some of these things could be interacting with each other as much as they’re interacting with us. Some would need to be used by both humans and machines. Agent centered design. Open communication: telepathy between machines. How will we know what’s going on? Beautiful seams.

Doesn’t think we should be making machines that empathize with us. The empathy should be ours.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Pierre Spring’s open stage presentation — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

What happened after the don’t make me steal workshop?

Outcome of the workshop was a manifesto that you can sign through a web app. Put it on hacker news and went for drinks. 4500 visitors in the first evening!

Luckily the server didn’t crash. Had nailed a need somewhere. 10’000 people signing within 3-4 days. Translations started coming in.

One story: hadopi. General secretary of hadopi contacted them through Twitter requesting to meet them. “Hrm ok, can we do that in Switzerland please?”

Spent several hours talking. Very positive. Offered to connect them in they started to reach 100’000 signatures. Also contacted by Dach, Pierre spent hours talking to them on Skype.

Nobody from the movie industry. A year later: things haven’t really changed. Movie industry still has people working on stuff like ACTA and SOPA. Sad!

In Switzerland, government decided NOT to change the law, still legal to download as long as you don’t share. Report saying losses are minimal.

MegaUpload got shut down. Pierre thinks it would never have existed if you could download legally.

This discussion will die down. We love movies. Just let us buy them, don’t make us steal them.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of James Bridle’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

Gibson: artistic creation doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Network realism: like when Gibson inserts silver flying penguins in his story, but they actually already exist in a video on YouTube, some company makes them, and in his story they’re flying about in the same building as in the video.

Code/Space. Check-in hall: if the code fails, the whole thing collapses into a big hall full of angry people.

Most of our cultural lives and literatures are spent in code/space. We outsource our memories and experiences to the network. Good, but intense consequences.

Caveat: space is a bad metaphor for the network/internet. There is no such thing as public space on the internet. steph-note: need to think about this, I always use the space metaphor.

Financial algorithms.

Two-thirds of wikipedia’s top editors (EN) are bots. SmackBot which locks down pages when there is too much frantic editing. Etc.

Wikipedia is a new paradigm in how we understand and coconstruct human knowledge. Big deal.

Artificial systems here have agency, motive, intention. We’re sharing the world and knowledge with them.

Comments where you don’t know if it’s a spambot or a human. steph-note: happens more and more to me, and it is unsettling.

Spambot comment, if you read it, something seems to be calling out to us in it. Feel like things that are desperately trying to speak to us! But they don’t know how, and we’re not trying to listen.

Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room. Ship in the middle of town. You can stay there. Lovely thing but a failed ship, it doesn’t go anywhere. James was asked to provide internetty stuff for the ship. Weather station on the roof. What would the ship do if it could fly, if it were adrift? Has been plotting it for a month — went straight to Poland.

The ship knows where it is virtually, and looks for stuff online related to where it is. Tweets, Foursquare, wikipedia entries. Creates a log of things it learns and tries to speak them up.

Strasseblickfernweh. Made-up view. Emotional response to seeing stuff through machines.

Polari, specific type of argot. Somebody on Twitter asking if @shipadrift is Nordic Polari. Ship started responding to personals. Was blocked! Ship can’t access anymore! sad.

James loves spambots, follows mostly spambots on Twitter. Likes the way they speak. If we keep killing spambots they’re never going to achieve sentience! It’s a shame, we live with these things.

steph-note: am going to look at spambots differently from now on

There are stories already in the world. Co-created. Need to be put in words. We need to be sympathetic to these things that share our world, speak to them, invite them into the world. They’re looking for consciousness.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Sebastian Deterding’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

What happens when our everyday life becomes more and more structured like a game?

Russian bureaucrats: need a job to get a flat, need a work permit to get a job, need a flat to get a work permit.

Mobile boarding pass. Transfer at Schipol, but image broken, can’t read QR code! Machine won’t provide paper boarding pass because pass has already been downloaded. Thankfully service agents are not robots… yet.

Gamification. Mindbloom.

Scary: what if we let computers run our systems and put humans inside? What happens?

1. The first thing we encounter is exceptions. The rule system might not foresee certain situations. But exceptions are the rule! We always need a manual override. Handling the exceptions.

The more we replace humans with computers, the more we remove these manual overrides.

2. Rules are also never explicit. Spirit and letter of the law. Work-to-rule: follow rules so strictly that nothing gets done.

Foursquare. In London, holding a session of foursquare users to determine what kind of behaviour is “in the spirit” of foursquare use.

Journalist who tried to gamify all aspects of his life during a week. Including “better fiancé”. You look lovely tonight! Pfff, you’re just doing it for the points.

The reason we’re doing something is really important for us.

Scratch: programming videogames visually, with resharing etc. Automatic credit line, but in the community social norms require a manual note with credit.

4. How rules beget gamers.

System => intention.

The more you use quantitative measures to influence decision making, the more the actions leading to those measure are subject to various forms of corruption.

Munchkin: tries to amass as many points as possible even if it’s at the expense of others. Maximise their outcome within a given system. Forget they are also social actors.

Everyday life is full of this kind of munchkin.

“Fixing the game” by Roger L. Martin — this is what happened to our economic systems. Too myopic on the results.

Same thing in organisations with KPIs and targets. Forget that they are there for the long-term survival of the company and not short-term personal benefit.

Also: the exploiter.

Guy who tried to raise his children using economic systems. Potty-training rewarded with sweets. Multiplication and fragmentation of potty-breaks.

Refunding a product when people write an amazon review.

The hacker: tries to reconnect the system to its intention. Often found in healthcare. Gaming the system to be able to heal patients.

Technologies of power. Systems, procedures, technologies set up by governments and institutions to get us to do what they want us to do. Foucault: technology used to rule people can also be used by people to rule themselves.

Book (do not read, bad novel): The Dice Man. Guy who decides for each decision to come up with six options and roll a dice.

If you set up a system to be competitive, that’s what you’ll see, but if you set it up differently, humans are actually pretty cooperative.