Very Interesting Projections - Technology and society: Here comes anyware | The Economist

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Smart thinking is needed about smart gadgets’ influence

Oct 8th 2011 | from The Economist print edition

"AUGUST 12TH 2011 marked the 30th anniversary of the launch of the IBM 5150 personal computer, which established the technical standards and design to which many PCs subsequently adhered. In a blog post to mark the occasion, Mark Dean, IBM’s chief technology officer in the Middle East and Africa, who worked on the original designs, revealed that he had already ditched his PC for a tablet computer. “When I helped design the PC,” he wrote, “I didn’t think I’d live long enough to witness its decline.” He went on to predict that the PC was destined to go the same way as typewriters and vinyl records.

The notion that a post-PC era has begun is not universally accepted. Microsoft, for instance, likes to talk instead about a “PC-plus” world in which millions of PCs will still be sold every year. It is true that the machines that first brought computing into people’s homes are not about to vanish, not least because there are many emerging markets where people still crave them. China, which could outstrip America as the world’s largest market for PCs next year, is one of many countries that still has plenty of potential for growth. Chinese computer-makers such as Lenovo, which acquired IBM’s PC business in 2005, are well placed to profit from this rising demand.

Nevertheless, as this special report has argued, a new age of personal technology is indeed dawning, at least in the rich world, in which people will depend on a far wider range of devices to keep them connected to friends, colleagues and others around the clock. It is hard to predict exactly what shape and form all of these gadgets will take, but there are going to be plenty of them. In places such as Africa, cheap smartphones could well turn out to be people’s primary computing devices. “We are in the process of putting supercomputers in many more people’s hands,” says Mr Huang, NVIDIA’s boss...."

Stephen Colbert drops sarcasm, honors Steve Jobs - via LA Times

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All day, newsmen have been quoting Jobs' inspiring words through the years, like his engaging keynote announcements, his philosophical 2005 Stanford commencement speech and the soaring rhetoric of the iTunes terms and conditions," Colbert quipped. "But on a personal note, I was one of the few people who could call Steve Jobs a close personal friend, in that he communicated with me once."...

Time for a Workshop: Arduinos Provide Interactive Exhibits for About $30 - via NYTimes.com

Excerpt:

“The Arduino has changed the way we can create and build exhibits,” said Hélène Alonso, director of interactive exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “In the past, we would have used 50 percent of our budget on computers that have now been replaced with the simplicity of the Arduino.”

A current exhibit at the museum called “Brain: The Inside Story,” uses an Arduino to calculate a person’s accuracy and brain power while tracing the shape of a star. Another exhibit at the museum lets people see the relationship of the weights of some dinosaurs in relation to those of humans.

For artists and designers, one of the biggest draws of the Arduino is the cost. A single Arduino, which can be used to control a number of aspects of a museum installation, costs just $30. Once an artist has a chip, inexpensive sensors can be added to make the device sentient.

Limor Fried, chief executive of a company called Adafruit, which sells Arduinos and other interactive components, said a number of artists buy motors and buzzers from her online store to try and make their artwork come alive.

“Artists want to create pieces that interact with the viewer, and the Arduino makes it so simple to do that,” Ms. Fried explained.

The do-it-yourself movement has been the driving force behind this new world of interactive art, she noted. “Hackers and geeks have been doing this for years, building all sorts of cool robots and interactive experiences, but now it’s become so simple and inexpensive that artists and designers have adopted it, too.”

Ms. Fried said artists often bought motors or sensors that detect light or sound. These can be used to create engaging interactive elements of a museum exhibit in which the viewer becomes a part of the art through movement or touch, she said.

A rich online community has developed around the Arduino. There are thousands of free tutorials, examples of programming code and forums to help people learn how to control and manipulate the device. This online community has helped to put the Arduino into designers’ hands and has made it a major part of museums around the world.

“The two most important introductions for art in the past 20 years have been the Arduino and Processing,” explained Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Processing is a free design program that can be used on a traditional computer to interact with an Arduino.

Ms. Antonelli said a number of artworks that would appear in an exhibit called “Talk to Me” had been created using the Arduino and Processing.

Tom Igoe, one of the co-creators of the Arduino and the head of the physical computing group at the Interactive Telecommunications Program of New York University, said curators in museums could see additional uses for the Arduino, like one in which the “painting starts looking back at you.”

“Imagine when every piece in a museum has an Arduino built in that can see how people interact and look at the artwork,” he said. “You could see a scenario when the curator rearranges an exhibit because a specific painting is being passed over by museumgoers....”

So Agree: Design to Communicate Research Effectively: Kevin Walker on Teaching designers to be researchers : Observatory: Design Observer

Students also considered the notion of activity theory, with its emphasis on motivation and mediation. Originating in Russia and Scandinavia, it has taken hold among HCI researchers — but not, as yet, in the wider design community. Our team found it useful for focusing on how tools (both external and cognitive) help people accomplish goals within socially-contextualized activities (rather than as individuals) as a unit of analysis. They looked at “thingness” — undoubtedly a reaction to the pervasiveness of screen-based information, this approach embraces the handmade, the natural and the physical, but also includes the embedding of digital technologies into physical objects. (A recent article in the New York Times detailed how $30 Arduino boards were bringing artworks to life in museums and galleries. Noted NYU’s Tom Igoe: “Imagine when every piece in a museum has an Arduino built in that can see how people interact and look at the artwork.”) They considered crowdsourcing — the idea that participants across the Internet contribute to and collaborate with others across a wide spectrum of activity (a particularly interesting proposition as it so dramatically opposes the traditional model of the lone scientist or, for that matter, the lone designer). And they looked at the notion of “constructionism.” Developed by MIT’s Seymour Papert several decades ago, it means giving people the tools to help them learn, through actually making something. The idea is that building something physical helps to build, in turn, cognitive structures, a loosely scientific idea that has a great deal to do with the way people process and respond to real information.


IE student Daria Filatova encounters airport signage at the Design Museum in Ghent, Belgium. Photo by Stephanie Lessmann


IE student Stephanie Lessmann invited people to explore her own brain in a walk-in forest of x-ray lamps

We explored different approaches to the notion of objectivity. The “soft sciences,” such as ethnography, tend to acknowledge and embrace subjectivity on the part of the researcher. Hard sciences like physics either reject objectivity outright (think of “Schroedinger's cat” thought experiment, for instance, in which the mere act of observation affects the outcome of an experiment) or, like journalists, scientists try to avoid the issue by relying on other sources of evidence — empirical methods, for example, for data collection and analysis. Indeed, while not necessarily seen as worthy in academic circles, journalistic methods have long been perceived as accepted practice in design research: interviewing people, investigative research, writing it up in concise and coherent stories — this is one of the strongest ways designers come to know their users. Calling it journalism — even investigative journalism — instead of scenarios or user stories exposes critical issues to the budding designer-researcher: it introduces methods, helps to define motives and ethics, and reinforces the necessity for ruthless objectivity.

Which brings us back to design. Designers can help researchers develop better tools for data collection and analysis, informed in turn by research — for example, activity theory can help to think about and design tools to help people accomplish particular goals.

More important than tools, though, research desperately needs design expertise to better communicate its findings. We found this out first-hand when it came time to present the results of our airport project to industry and government officials. So accustomed were they to reading long, boring reports and documents that simply seeing research concisely and visually presented on nicely-designed posters was a revelation to them. Some of the students' work was immediately picked up for commercial development.

It was vindication that we were doing something right. More important to me was watching the students go from designers to researchers: in January they tended to approach projects with already sketched-out ideas in their heads; by June they were already formulating their own methodologies and handing in publication-quality research papers.

As designer-researchers, we can make our own tools for investigation. This is nothing new; think of science from Leonardo to the Large Hadron Collider. Or indeed, design research methods such as “cultural probes” developed by Bill Gaver, Tony Dunne and Elena Pacenti. There is an urgent need — and opportunity — for well-designed presentations of scientific data which go beyond screen-based eye candy, informed by research into cognition and perception, as well as conveying meaningful content.

Innovative Interactivity (II) | Behind the scenes of “Goa hippy tribe”

Behind the scenes of “Goa hippy tribe”

Last January I took you behind the scenes of “Africa to Australia,” a multimedia site by SBS Online. Their latest project “Goa hippy tribe” is another Flash-heavy, video-rich site that incorporates Facebook connect to personalize the experience.

I was hesitant to blog about this site though due to the nudity and open dialogue about drug use, but then I realized that this is actually a great vehicle to discuss rationale behind telling these types of stories. So, I invite you to read the following Q&A with Darius Devas (Director), Nick Doherty (Managing Editor, TV Online) and Matt Smith (Designer and Developer), then I’d love to hear your thoughts on the site in the comments below.

1. How did this story come about? Why did you feel it was important to share the story of this tribe?

Darius D: What made it so interesting for me was how the tribe had all spontaneously reunited on Facebook in 2009 which sparked the idea to have a reunion. The fact that they had all gone to Goa to escape the west and civilisation and then all these years later, Facebook the ultimate symbol of modern culture was what brought them all back together was just so fascinating and then to be able to realise the project through Facebook, the same thing that brought them together again, made for such an incredible project.

Nick D: Goa Hippy Tribe continues SBS’s R&D into new forms of factual storytelling. Following the online-only documentary Africa to Australia and a couple of multiplatform projects, Immigration Nation and Go Back to Where You Came From, it was really, from the broadcaster’s point of view, an experiment into whether we could build audience for a documentary through social media and then migrate it back to the network. The traditional broadcast model in reverse, really. It is vital that SBS continues trying to reach audiences on whichever platform they prefer.

Listening: Design Matters- Alex Bogusky and John Bielenberg : Design Observer

From DesignObserver:

"Alex Bogusky’s career in communications began over twenty years ago when he joined Crispin and Porter Advertising in 1989 as an art director. He became the creative director five years later, a partner in 1997, and co-chairman in 2008. In 2010 Alex left what he called, "the best job on the planet," to create The FearLess Revolution. He and his band of insurgents, in what they refer to as "the new consumer revolution," are creating, consulting, and reporting on the emergence of a sudden and powerful counterbalance to corporate power: an educated and empowered consumer. Their most recent project is COMMON, a creative community for rapidly prototyping social ventures.

John Bielenberg helps organizations find the courage and the sense of humor to consider whole new “wrong” ways of bringing their stories, ideas, and innovations out into the world. He is currently collaborating with Alex Bogusky on COMMON. In his career, John has won over 250 design awards, was nominated for two National Design Awards from the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has acquired six of his projects and staged a solo exhibition in 2000. John is also a founding partner of C2, MavLab, and Nada Bicycle Collective."

Innovative Interactivity (II) | Behind the scenes of “Africa to Australia” #idoc

Behind the scenes of “Africa to Australia”

Many of you may know that I am a big fan of interactive documentaries. So, when Matt Smith of SBS Online approached me about their newest interactive “Africa to Australia,” I knew that I wanted to take you behind the scenes.

Six videos and six photo stories document the stories of African refugees and immigrants living in Australia. Each is presented in a full-browser Flash interface, and deep-linked for easy access. Moreover, all content is presented in seven languages, from English and French to Dinka and Swahili.

I hope you enjoy this interview with multimedia producer Matt Smith and documentary editor John MacFarlane. Personally, I enjoyed learning how they successfully managed a team of 30 producers and how they overcame difficulties that they faced offering multiple languages.

1. Explain the rationale for doing this story – how did the idea come about and who pitched it to whom?

John MacFarlane: The evolution of this project was slightly out of the ordinary. There wasn’t a pitch, but in this case that also meant there wasn’t pressure in the early stages to focus on anything too specific – which can be a luxury.

Africa to Australia actually began as an idea tossed back and forth between SBS and Screen Australia (a national funding body) to find a home for some new and archival footage about African refugees and immigrants.

SBS had commissioned a documentary called Community Cop, about a policeman in Melbourne working with a (mostly young) African refugee community in inner-city Melbourne, and it was decided that we could film additional interviews with the key characters with the intention of creating some kind of online project around that footage. Then the project grew somewhat and we began thinking about presenting a wider spectrum of stories – most Africans in Australia have arrived quite recently, and there are some common threads and themes in their stories, as well as (of course) many unique aspects. We realised we had an opportunity to provide a deeper look into these communities.