blog all dog-eared pages: Olafur Eliasson, Book 13: The Conversation Series, Hans Ulrich Obrist · 1.07.08
Made me smile constantly. The book, the artist (seems pretty broken though), the interviewer. Part of an interview.
p30 : “We always used to look at a map if we couldn’t find our way around a city. Now the map is part of the city, and you can either experience the city guided by the map and just be on the map, or you can go into the city and just be in the city. The map is not better or worse than the city; it just has a different representational level. The problem arises when freedom is limited – when you’re told that the map is, in fact, the city, or the city is the map, and you then believe this. Like at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, where it’s suggested you’re in a real situation, but in fact it’s very representational – you’re displaced, as it were.”
p34 : “To me, virtuality is connected with interactivity – not interactivity in a “press the yes or no button” kind of way, though. Until a few years ago, the feeling of the virtual was so representational that you could only relate to it as a sort of grid. I think this has changed now. Today, virtuality means interactivity in the sense that if you engage, the virtuality changes. And, perhaps more importantly, as you do that, you change as well, because you’ve taken it upon yourself to engage, to interact. The double perspective is acknowledged by the virtual space. The important thing is that virtuality should have an impact on you, just as you should have an impact on it. As a result, it contains a certain unpredictability.”
p41 : “Well, I think my medium is people … And a robot is only interesting because you know something about people. ... I think the weather has some great advantages over the car, such as its mundaneness … The weather, in all its shades, is really about tactility … It has these really physical aspects, but it’s also physical on an intellectual level. When you think about the cosmological potential of weather, it becomes almost physical. And yet, the weather also holds unbelievably profound questions: what is time? What is unpredictability? What is chaos? What is the turbulence of our atmosphere and universe? In other words, the weather also incites some very large, existential questions.”
p76 : the Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam
p80 : the Iceland National Concert and Conference Centre
p86 : Louis Vuitton store in Paris – Your loss of senses, 2005
p93 : “We are on the reverse side of Iceland. South behind us, north in front. The wind, as you can hear, is blowing from the north-northeast. We are not only on the rear stretch of Iceland, we are also behind the rest of the group. The ten other travelers are about four hours in front of us in two jeeps, keeping each other company. Having lost them, we are now on our own. We were delayed because we had to put our map-reader, Alain Robbe-Grillet, on a small rescue plane. I think they are flying somewhere beyond us, over the glacier. The air there is more dense because it is cooler, and the airplane can smoothly fly lower, so it is currently surfing the surface of the glacier down to Eiðar. This is also where we are heading.”
p96 : “The cupola was just to give [the car] that dimension that it absolutely did not possess, named the unexpected; it’s the car’s unpredictably reality. ... The car accommodates whatever kind of trip you want to have: we can bring a small kitchen if we want to have a chef-and-cuisine sort of trip, or we can just stock the usual astronaut food, which we did on this journey – much to our disadvantage, perhaps. We can really change it into anything. If we go fast enough it will start to fly – levitate, I call it. And it even sails if needed; hopefully this will not be the case. We also had a nice sound system put in recently. Maybe we should throw this song on. I think it suits the car.”
p113 : “But the thing about the Alps and their location in the center of Europe is that they’ve almost become another theme park. The mountains have been industrialized or colonized into something no longer about spatial questions, but about mediated relationships. ... There are no images or reports to compare [this vista in Iceland] to inside your head, nothing to calibrate it against. ... Of course, everything is fundamentally mediated insofar as we carry and project ideas from one knowledge set onto others, but that’s a discussion for another time.”
p120 : Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
p131 : “The idea is to establish an interdisciplinary school that focuses on spatial issues. It will do so primarily from the perspective of art and artists, but it should also have a group of architects and perhaps several scientists working on, for instance, psychophysical issues … the school is not about producing artists in the traditional sense, but about introducing a vocabulary through which artworks can become much more integrated into society, social structures, and scientific and architectural discourses.”
p136 : The afterimage experiment (30 min film), Zeiss Planetarium, Berlin, 2006. (Can’t find much about this, but this mentions it, and is quite interesting in itself)
p169 : Robert Irwin – also, Michael Asher – also.
revelations · 18.05.08
I don’t go on holiday expecting revelations.
But if you go to a country like Japan, spend a while wandering, observing, interacting and doing, you’re bound to be sensitive to difference, and open to possibility. I spent 3 weeks in Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima, yes, doing the touristy stuff, but also taking my time, walking the boundaries, exploring the domestic, as well as the spectacular.
I’d spent the afternoon touring the zen buddhist temples of Daitoku-ji – I enjoyed these more than most of the larger, grander temples of Kyoto – however the revelation wasn’t here. It was catching the bus back into the centre of town, when I saw this bus stop. It shows when the buses will arrive, nothing more, nothing less. It’s a perfect example of tasteful ubicomp; clear, direct, single purpose, useful, and 100% reliable. What clicked with me is that it wasn’t electronic; no scrolling messages or LEDs. It was just there, in the background. And it worked – in other words, the complete opposite of the London Countdown system; ubiquitously signaling, minimally accurate. It was technology dissolved in the city, changing the experience for the better. I wonder if anything ‘electronic’ – screens, lights, buttons – will seem natural. It’s a choice we can make. Probably industry has or will force it to be – the Blade Runner future of screens everywhere – but it will take 50, 100 years to inter that as a natural part of the environment (the last technology to do so was probably the fixed-line telephone).
For just over a week I didn’t have a good reliable Internet connection. Not strictly true; I had my phone, and was perfectly able to get online if neccessary, but I was aware that someone would end up paying, at least. Two days were self-imposed removal, no laptop. Occasional access to the social Internet, through gmail, twitter and flickr on phone, but no useful Internet. Now, I know I’m not a normal tourist – I’m a planner by heart – I believe knowledge is power, and you can get so much more from knowing a little about your environment. So, I’d digested 3 guidebooks before the holiday. What struck me is that I’ve got in a mode of asking a lot of questions to make the now- and very-next better. When does the sun set today? What’s the weather forecast for the next 3 hours? Will I get sunburnt? Where’s the best place for sushi? What’s the special menu at the restaurant? What’s Plan B? and C? How do I get there? What’s it near? When does the store open? Does it take credit cards? Where are the monkeys? WHERE ARE THE MONKEYS? Not fluidtime, but fluidholiday. I could chop and change what I did, when I did it, but also seem ‘in the know’: the experience whilst experienced was maximised, and without the Internet, I felt dumb, I felt as though what I needed to know at any time was unrememorable, fuzzy.
Another huge change is the blue flashing ‘you are here’ dot in Google Maps Mobile. I can’t read Japanese maps, on paper or on phone, but being able to moderately precisely geolocate, and position myself on other hand-scrawled maps was invaluable, especially when leaving a railway station with 50 exits – the big new feature of Japanese mobile phone navigation is to guide you through all the stations. The big difference in Japan (and other Asian countries) is that it’s truly 3d cities – shops, bars, restaurants may be 5 floors below in the basement, or 110 stories up. Stairs, stairs everywhere, metro stations resemble 6 sided cube labyrinths. And, everyone seems lost. All the time. People carry and stare at files of addresses and maps. It’s unclear how many use the (pay-per-play) mobile phone navigation. With a universal ideolocator, and mobile email, I’m already forgetting to print off maps before I leave for somewhere (not even looking where I’m going if I think I have the address stored somewhere). It’s a lot of reliance on technology that is still very fallible, but it really makes me think it will change the way the world works, more so than the last 6-20 years we’ve been talking about it.
Japan is a land of happy. Aggressively loud happy. Moving cranes sing at you, the metro stations play their quirky tunes, Shibuya streets sound like Mario. Places thank you. Signs wear bowties. Meanwhile, a friend had met Toshiwa Iwai, who said “let’s all make happy interfaces” – to which another friend thought “[he] has precisely the wrong idea”. I stand in the middle. I’m a bit sick of plain utility, to be honest. I certainly want more politeness in technology, but if there’s an opportunity to mix in some happy, I’m unsure if that’s bad. It’s happy as in power moves, cheat codes, easter eggs, winking, delight, maybe even just plain working obsequiously and doing the right thing, flow.
Unplaceable – gyoza stadium, noh, raumen museum, visible dog, more pork, firewalking, moss the interrupter, random tv, nightingale floors, mr young men, penguin hobbling hour, more penguins, shoes from the future, sky gardens, always North, kitchen knife blacksmith since 1560, royal milk tea, songs from the 63rd floor.
Comment [2]
to whom it may concern · 17.05.08
Our team at work – Service and UI Design within Nokia Design – is expanding, and we’ve got jobs going in Palo Alto and Helsinki/Espoo for both visual and interaction designers. You’d be working directly with myself, Adam, Younghee and Raph, and just along the org chart from Jan. Of course, there are many other excellent designers who prefer not to witter in public about their life: it really is a dream team, and I don’t think you can be in a better place to shape the future than Nokia Design.
You’ll need to apply through the Nokia recruitment site, not here – consider it an intelligence test. The jobs to search for are:
Interaction designers, Espoo: ESP0000022U, ESP0000022T
Comms designer, Espoo: ESP0000022V
Interaction designers, Palo Alto: SAN000000BQ, SAN000000BP
Comms designer, Palo Alto: SAN000000BV
10.6 · 10.05.08
One question I get asked a lot, by people who know me, is, “just how many tshirts do you have?”. I’ve never known the answer, until today, when I did a bit of a reorganisation of my wardrobes. I’d assumed the answer was somewhere between two and five hundred…
To make it easier to calculate, I devised the Heathcote – a unit of measure for bulk quantities of tshirts. One Heathcote = 30 tshirts, which roughly =s an Ikea tarp bag, or a large domestic black rubbish sack. It also sounds less daunting – my first quick calculation was 10.6 Heathcotes, which makes me sound less crazy than owning 318 tshirts.
Actually I realised that I’d missed one pile, thus the calculation was:
176 dirty
67 on hangers
20 clean hangers
6 new graniph
49 clean, folded
8 white dirty
= 326
I’ve just remembered there’s a whole pile of plain tshirts in another drawer, so this number will go up. Up to 11, at least, if not 12.
The rules are quite simple: tshirts are counted, including long sleeve, but excluding jumpers, fleeces, undergarments and anything that has a technical use (e.g. base layers, running kit).
If I was an artist, I would buy up to 365, then wear each one once for a day, then burn them all. But I’m not, and I won’t – unless I can get a grant for it. If any gallery wants to exhibit them all, that’s a different matter.
There were no surprises, just lots of memories – I can tell you the story of every tshirt, and I love them all, even if some are impossible or inappropriate to still wear. Most are Mediums, except a few Smalls from when I was smaller, and a lot younger, a few Large, weirdly all from Copenhagen, where the tshirts are stretchier and the people must be a hell of a lot thinner (I have no problems with mediums from Japan), and a very few Xlarges, from even before the Smalls, when I didn’t know any better about clothes fitting.
It’s hard to pick favourites – but this one is probably the top of the pile:
It was bought on my first trip to New York, 10 years ago, at the Pop Shop. It’s robots, it’s pink, and in the mind of humans they’re doing something vaguely rude. Unfortunately, this is a Small, as are the other shirts I bought on the same trip (a lovely pixellated donkey kong one by XLarge, and a burning house reprint by David Wojnarowicz, bought at the New Museum, who were showing a retrospective).
These days, it’s a lot easier to buy tshirts from the comfort of your own computer. I miss the thrill of the chase, and the exclusivity buying a tshirt in New York, or Tokyo, gives. These are my top places to buy from:
Threadless – a mixed bag of designs, a few too many large prints, and hardly exclusive any more – I was in a Helsinki supermarket and someone else was wearing exactly the same tshirt. That said, at last count I own 56 Threadless tees, so they’re doing something right.
graniph – my favourite designers have opened an international web shop. Great if you like tightly kerned German Helvetica. Be careful though, some of the tees are rather rude (I throw the text into Google Translate before wearing).
beams t – another great Tokyo tee shop, but rather more expensive. Luckily, it’s easier and cheaper to get 2K tees from other places now, but they do some nice exclusives. (they seem to have closed down their international web store, weirdly)
Also-rans include oddica and la fraise – unfortunately I just don’t get on with their designs and styles. Both technically print great teeshirts though.
Comment [7]
abstract pointillist · 5.05.08
POINT ONE: Presentations are about IDEAS, not TEXT.
POINT TWO: READING from SLIDES is a heinous crime.
POINT THREE: PEOPLE cannot COPE without some kind of visual STIMULATION.
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WARNING: This is an ADVANCED powerpoint technique, for which you will need to be CONFIDENT in your argumentation. It should not be used by minors or those without the appropriate powerpoint LICENSE.
EXTRA BONUS: Why spend minutes trying to get the projector to work whilst showing your slides? Add the powerpoint testcard as your first slide, and check that colours, resolution and aspect ratio are correct. You can even check that your font size is readable (if you have to have words).
Comment [7]
hello, futuresonic · 3.05.08
I’ve just come back from the social media conference at Futuresonic (the arts and music streams continue – unfortunately the rail system takes the bank holiday off, so I’ve unfortunately had to miss Agaskodo Teliverek and Wire).
I gave three talks, all in all, as did Matt Jones, and it was great to meet and talk with Justin Hall and Aleks Krotoski, similarly giving a number of talks or presiding over proceedings.
It felt a bit like intensive exams in ubicomp and social technology. The talks were all quite different, to different audiences, and I hadn’t had time to really produce my argumentation before the conference. This could be a good thing – they’re distillations of my current thinking. My notes are a bit sparse to maybe make complete sense of (I use more of a jazz style of presenting, riffing during a slide, being pulled back to the beat for the next) – but I’ve put the two ‘Point talks up on slideshare – see the comments on each slide for my notes.
The first was for Manchester Digital, a local trade group of new media companies. It’s great to see such organisations spring up around the country, and it felt like both the companies and the council were really trying to create something good for Manchester. My talk was about ubiquity of media, if not ubiquity of (Internet) connection. Most of it lays out the dimensions that I think are important when considering online media. It’s my first presentation in a Chinese restaurant.
The second was five minutes about social networking. I’m quite fundamentalist about supporting real world social contacts first, so I told a story about what happens when the line between online and real life blur:
My name is Chris Heathcote, and I am not an Internet celebrity.
However, twice in my life, a stranger has walked up to me in public, and said, “You’re Chris Heathcote, aren’t you?”
At conferences like these, I’d accept that maybe someone might possibly know who I was. Out on the street, it’s an odd situation.
The first time was 12 years ago, in a silly nightclub called Cruz 101, here in Manchester (I googled it last night, and it still exists, which is surprising, and even better, now bills itself as “the premier gay nightclub in the North West region”). At the time, I was prolific on a lot of UK newsgroups, and at some time, various groups had met up. Someone had taken pictures with their new expensive 0.3MP digital camera, and put them online. In public. And someone had seen them, and then seen me.
The second time was 3 weeks ago, in Tokyo. Someone else who was visiting Japan had known I’d probably be in town due to my delicious links. He knew me from when I wrote a lot about location, including a few pieces in Mapping Hacks.
On both occasions, I was terribly British, mumbled Hello, had a few minutes of small talk, and ran away.
I’m fascinated by social etiquette. What struck me in these situations was that the information (and therefore power) was one-sided – I had no idea who they were, yet they knew a lot about me – even what I thought, where I’d been, and who I knew. (I must say, they acted extremely nicely and properly, and any hang ups are entirely mine).
The bloke in Tokyo actually added me as a contact in Flickr afterwards, which struck me as a very nice thing to do – if you’re reading this, thank you, and good to meet you.
I’m interested that normal people will start having to deal with new situations, that maybe only true celebrities had to deal with before. There’s a slight difference, in that, I’m actually interested in meeting the people who want to meet me, whereas real celebrities, I would guess, aren’t.
This applies online as well – the death knell for many blogs has been when a stranger has comment on their blog or flickr for the first time. People think they’re writing or talking to their friends, an illusion that remains until the feedback loop is completed. I got freaked out in a similar way when someone used my open wifi for the first time – even though I’d opened it explicitly for that purpose.
So, what new social etiquettes will technology cause?
The third talk was about urban media, and I particularly focussed on context, data and metadata and the mobile experience for my take on the future.
It was really great to be back in Manchester. All of the time, save a quick walk from Piccadilly, down Canal Street, to Princess Street, was spent in the Manchester University end of Manchester, where I didn’t spend much time when studying in Salford. Everything seemed strangely similar, if very different, given 10 year off: a reality uncanny valley. There was a frisson of positiveness and creativity (and, well, youth) that was palpable and exciting, and I hope to get back to Manchester soon to do a proper explore.
The conference was interesting, but I felt pretty out of my depth with so much talk from a media art and critical academia take on life. I am, inevitably, seen as The Man in these situations, and was accused of flippancy in discussions about privacy. I worry about such topics more than most, so it’s a bit gutting. I do believe you can only see the problems once you build and try (and iterate) new things, rather than talking and discussing possible outcomes. I guess that will always be a difference of opinion with some, especially academics.
The Best New Thing I saw at the conference was Shannon Spanhake’s Squirrel pollution monitor, that connects to mobile phones to provide data points for a ubiquitous pollution monitoring network. The best thing is that she’s built it, and it works (it could even detect changes in carbon monoxide when a smoker breathed on it). Now she’s looking at visualisation and scaling the project up. Great stuff.
Oh, that, and RZAmaths…
Thanks in particular to Drew Hemment, Tullis Rennie, Tapio Makela and Matt Locke.
Comment [1]
blog all purchases: Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley · 3.05.08
Psychogeography is an overview of the… movement(?), feeling(?) that’s quite popular at the moment. Russell had mentioned the book to me, and, like him, I’m uncomfortable with publicly handling the hot potatoes and sharp minds mentioned in the book. For me, it filled in a lot of back story, particularly pre-Debord, and has acted as a reader, introducing me to the following books:
Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
The Man of the Crowd (available in Selected Tales) by Edgar Allen Poe
A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain by Daniel Defoe
Things Near and Far by Arthur Machen
The London Adventure or the Art of Wandering by Arthur Machen
everything i.e. anything · 28.04.08
Sorry to break the regular silence.
A quick note to say I’ll be speaking at Futuresonic. Say hello, etc. I really should work out the 3 positions I’m meant to take. They’ll probably take the form of “what I did on my holiday”.
Also, I wonder about the generally euphoric reception of Clay’s talk at Web 2.0, stating that, paraphrasing, if we just stopped watching a little TV, we could spend that time doing something more useful. We could build thousands of Wikipedias.
A few thoughts come to mind: I’m a bit shocked at the general protestant work ethic undercurrents. It’s not a cognitive surplus; it’s a way of coping. The real question is why these people are creating Wikipedia when they could be sleeping instead. We’re processing hundreds, if not thousands of times more information per day than previous humans – how are we meant to make sense of it all if we have no downtime?
There’s also a weird anti-consumption spin. Nothing is worth creating if it isn’t consumed (yes, yes, there’s gain in the process of making, or craft, also). What about if all those people reading Wikipedia spent their time writing it instead? The ratio of active to passive users, consumers to creators, will always be high, and may be pretty immutable, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It would be great if people did create more, and especially felt empowered to create, change, edit, curate, but we can’t expect them to do that without consumption and reflection. Time spent on the Internet (mainly consumption, remember) is overtaking that spent watching TV in some countries/certain segments – is that time really better spent because you’re clicking on things?
I’m a big fan of TV, too. I find it a flimsy argument that grinding in World of Warcraft, watching Youtube videos, or I dunno, playing Sim City for 40 hours straight (Spore is going to kill me) is in any way better than watching TV, merely because it’s ‘doing something’. There’s good TV, and bad TV, but I refuse to even make a value judgement of bad TV being worse than good computer games or web browsing. It’s just leisure activity. Passing the time. Taking a break. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. You might even learn something in the process.
And I like gin. More gin! Gin.
Comment [3]
a river runs through it: the Thames Path · 27.01.08
(for World’s Best Urban Spaces & Places)
Not a standard urban space, more one that stitches London’s best together, The Thames Path slices through the city from the Thames Barrier to Surrey and beyond to the river source.
Other national walks, like the Capital Ring, are man-made; the Thames Path just officially links the many towpaths and embankments that have been trod for centuries. It tells the story of London, from the docks and heavy industry of the East, through to the palaces of royalty and the landed gentry – and the reinvention and reuse that any old city has to embrace. Pockets of modernism spring through, though: the Thames Barrier, Millennium Dome, South Bank. 21st century follies to those from the 14th.
It’s a path for walking, exercising, meandering, cycling, boating, eating, talking, remembering and forgetting; those wanting quick respite from the city surrounding, to those rambling from end to end. It’s London’s dichotomy at its best, a densely packed city with constant access to nature and the countryside.
I can’t think of any other city that can offer both the long deep history of a river like the Thames, nor the public right of way from one end to the other. The best cities have a river running through, but none offer the diversity of city life like the Thames – industry, folly, work, pleasure, greenery, countryside, but still unmistakably urban.
(original photos here)
blog all dog-eared pages: The Design Of Future Things by Don Norman · 19.01.08
Don Norman is a hero. Two of his books – Design/psychology of Everyday Things, and The Invisible Computer – remain touchstones: they led me into the murky worlds of user-centred design and interaction design. So it’s gutting that his last book, Emotional Design, and his new effort, The Design of Future Things, feel weak, unconvincing and without rigour.
It’s frustrating, as there are some interesting ideas here, both good and bad, but they remain unexplored, often thrown away in half a page, as again and again the book veers towards rehashing the same thoughts about intelligent cars and smart homes. Arguments seem muddled, often seemingly both for and against technological intelligence, and commits my cardinal sin: criticism without a proposal of a fix. It feels like 50- and 60-year old football commentators, complaining about the speed or intelligence of some player, when the game has changed since they ever competed.
It’s a quick book, but certainly not essential, and presses many of my hot buttons throughout – robots, education, virtual reality – and it’s a shame, as there are moments of interest along the way.
p5-7: Two Monologues do Not Make a Dialogue
...Tom dislikes his navigation system, even though he agrees that at times it would be useful. But he has no way to interact with the system to tailor it to his needs. Even if he can make some high-level choices – “fastest,” “shortest,” “most scenic,” or “avoid toll road” – he can’t discuss with the system why a particular route is chosen… What if navigation systems were able to discuss the route with the driver?
This is one of the most interesting ideas in the book. I’m a great fan of trying to let people play with their data (or, in my shorthand, Stamenize it). In a conversation with Eric a few years ago, I remember saying something like – we shouldn’t (and probably can’t) provide a view of data that answers the question, but a number of views that a person can use to answer the question for themselves.
p9: So-called intelligent systems have become too smug. They think they know what is best for us. Their intelligence, however, is limited. And this limitation is fundamental: there is no way a machine has sufficient knowledge of all the factors that go into human decision making.
I’d posit that these smug systems may have resulted from use cases, and traditional user-centred design. We’ve been taught to design systems for a purpose – preferably one purpose – collected through use cases and designed against them. Use case collection never really includes crazy ideas or tries to foretell unexpected and unplanned uses. Good design, in my mind, is designing enablers or tools that include the use cases given, but have breathing room, rather than designing strictly to the use cases. It could be said that this reduces usability, and it often does, but with the flipside of user value.
p59: Natural Interaction
Although simple tones and flashes of white or colored light are the easiest ways for designers to add signals to our devices, they are also the least natural, least informative, and most irritating of means. A better way to design the future things of everyday life is to use richer, more informative, less intrusive signals: natural signals. Use rich, complex, natural lights and sounds…
Like what? This is one of the most irritating passages. The only example is ‘the sound of boiling water’, which is trite, as it’s actually water boiling in a kettle. If you start using ‘natural’ notifications, they aren’t natural to the task in hand, and are therefore a learnt association. This is just how it has to be for intangible interactions. Even the most natural – a ringing bell of a phone call – is a learnt sound, from over a century of use. Notifications are a Hard Problem, given the palette of interactions we can use and the design constraints.
p66: Physical marks provide another possible direction. When we read paper books and magazine, we may leave marks of our progress, whether through normal wear and tear of by deliberate folding of pages … In electronic documents, all of these cues don’t have to be lost… why not make wear marks on the software?
Argh. No. This isn’t digital art. And again, it’s unnatural given the situation. If we have wear marks, we should really use the metaphor of real paper, and real books. The natural marks of electronic text are the links to, the referrers, the views, the links out: the hypertext, the associations, and the metadata. These can be visualised to provide implicit signals.
p98: When the day comes that the steering is under the car’s control, the car might very well decide to take you to the restaurant of its choice, possibly even preordering your favorite food for you. “what,” the car might say to you, “you mean you don’t want your favorite food every day, every meal? Strange – why is it your favorite then?”
What about an overload of advertisements or viruses inserted into the telephones, computers, and navigation system in the auto? Is this possible? Never underestimate the cleverness of advertisers, or mischief makers, or criminals.
There’s a lot of use of ad absurdum reasoning in this book. However, I get the point – I’ve been having discussions with a lot of people about the future of advertising recently, and there is a small minority of people who would see the scenario above and think it’s a great thing.
p114: Situation awareness… refers to a person’s knowledge of the context, the current state of things, and what might happen next. In theory, a person could still be in the loop, stay fully aware of the situation… being ready to step in when needed. This passive observation is not very rewarding, however… In experimental psychology, this situation is often called vigilance, and… studies of vigilance demonstrate deterioration in performance with time.
Noted mainly for the word, to look up more about, but it’s interesting paired with the notification stuff earlier. Thinking about mobile phones, you’re always in a state of vigilance – is someone calling me? have I received a message? – and you get odd psychological results – the fact everyone checks their phone when they hear a phone ringing, even if not their ringtone, the imaginary pocket vibration, etc.
p118: Consider the mundane task of making a cup of coffee… The result is that I have replaced the mild tedium of making coffee each morning with the more onerous need to maintain my machine… the automation lets me time-shift the demand on my attention: I trade a little bit of work at an inconvenient time – when I have just awakened, am still somewhat sleepy, in a rush – with considerable work later, which I can schedule at my convenience.
It’s an interesting trade-off, and one that would be hard to quantify.
p152: ((6 design rules))
I’m not going to list them here, as I guess they’re the nub of the book. But what I will say – there’s no proof that this list of 6 is canonical, irrefutable, final, and finished. It’s just 6 design principles to think about, 5 out of 6 of them being incredibly basic user-centred design or common sense. They join the hundreds of principles and drivers that most designers unconsciously think about when designing.
p172: Designers must be generalists who can innovate across disciplines. In turn, they must be able to call upon specialists to help develop their designs and to ensure their components are appropriate and practical.
I’m not going to get into the hoary question of What Is A Designer?, but I’ll say I almost agree – good designers are specialists, great designers are generalists who have a specialism. And lets not even go down the route of design vs. Design, design thinking, design strategy, or just plain common sense and business.
p172: It is time for a science of design… To date, engineers have attempted to apply formal methods and algorithms that optimize the mechanical and mathematical aspects of a design but tend to ignore the social and the aesthetic. The artistic side, on the other hand, fiercely resists systematization, believing it will destroy the creative heart of design. However, as we move toward the design of intelligent machines, rigor is absolutely essential.
Poppycock. I think we’ve already explored the fact that you can never ever break down problems into a complete set of use cases? Applying scientific rigor, such as old-skool usability, suffers from reaching local maxima: you will refine, but never fundamentally change an idea. Any attempt at providing the “science bit” only works if you have great designers who know when to break the rules (this is the slight-of-hand that Ideo play – provide a seemingly rigourous process to pacify management, then use designers who don’t need to follow the process to produce good results).
p174: ((a picture of Norman in a three-dimensional virtual space))
You have to question anything that ends on 3d spaces.
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