Dopplr as you all know is a great travel service – You fill in the cities you are going to travel to and every six months you are sent a wonderful automated travel report visualising your travel data in a very clear way.
The time taken to add your ‘data’ to Dopplr is something you really don’t mind as the benefits outweigh the ‘cost’.
What if you could record data about anything and visualise this in a personal report?
Nicholas Feltron has been doing just that for quite a few years – collecting everything any and every piece of mundane information and visualising them beautifully in his annual Feltron reports.
Daytum was created as a way for Nicholas to store all of this information. You sign into site and add a ‘thing’ with an ‘amount’ – cigarette : 1
This then gets logged into the system with a timestamp and as you smoke you keep updating the site. A mobile twitter interface is thankfully on hand as updating your data via a website is a chore upon a chore. Now you just have to tweet your ‘thing’ with your ‘amount. A similar system called your.flowing.data created by Nathan Yau is entirely built on top of twitter to store your data.
These are systems for the committed – You have to be in the mindset to fire off a tweet to record that thing.
Can objects we naturally interact with start to share the data they store?
The Wifi body scale is automated and is single minded in what it records.
Another great example is the Sleep Cycle iphone app – It is an alarm clock that wakes you up when you are in the lightest part of your sleep cycle. It does this by monitoring how you are moving while you sleep – the phone accelerometer registers your motion and figures out the best point you can wake up. Aside from sleeping better, the app produces a variety of graphs to help you understand your sleep cycle.
So can we automate the collection of any data without changing our normal behaviour?
Poyozo gives you your own data back by downloading the information you’re currently giving to the web on to your own computer. You can opt-in to importing your data from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Last.fm, Google Calendar, any email service, any RSS feed, Flickr, Wesabe, Listit, Skydeck, Dopplr, your Firefox browsing history, the local weather, and your location, allowing you to access all of this personal data as easily as the companies that run these services can.
So if we could be generating our own automated annual Feltron reports. What insights could they offer? Could they offer insights into our behaviour and moods
I was having a lovely lunch time chat with Mike Stenhouse about this very subject – He has been exploring a lot of these ways to visualise connections between data at trampoline systems and also in his own time. He started explain some of the prototypes he had built, gave some brilliant examples i’d never heard of and we chewed over some other random scenarios.
Did you gain weight one week (wifi scales) because you ate at a certain restaurant (foursquare) or you went on a business trip (dopplr). Were you sad at work one day (twitter), listening to incredibly depressing music (last.fm) and searching for a new job (bookmarks) and buying something to cheer youself (purchases). Could the report then identity that you were the happiest on a certain day or offer some insight into why.
Would be eventually be drowning in data from our lives and eventually be finding patterns with no meaning? Maybe so, but I for one would love to try it and see.
I love the possibilities of what smaller, faster and more portable technologies can off the world – how human/computer interaction will evolve and how technology augments our lives. It’s really not that far away where data and content will just be able to pass from object to object as easy as in Minority Report.
Slurp is an incredibly interesting concept – giving intangible (digital) information a physical interface. It takes the form on an eyedropper and it effectively becomes a pointer to digital objects – you point – suck in the content from one object then spit it out at another object.
Our goal is to privilege spatial relationships between devices and people while providing new physical manipulation techniques for ubiquitous computing environments.
Slurp is easy to pick up and understand but it lacks a visual interface into the objects you are manipulating. My mind wandered back to how augmented reality mobile GUI’s could start to have the ability to change our environment if we lived in an age of ubiquitous computing. A smart home and a phone app controlling the lights, heating, bath etc is really not that innovative so what types of interactions haven’t we seen?
What if you could point and click onto a light to turn it off?
An interface into physical objects would transform our lives but also raises serious privacy and safety issues, and needs a massive leap of faith for us to embrace it. It only needs technology to improve and a protocol for it to happen – as a theory it has been labelled ‘Endosymbiotic Computing’.
Endosymbiotic Computing entails attaching an RF-enabled microcontroller module (endomodule) to an appliance such that it appears as a networked device in the cyber world. It enables a smart phone to work as not only a universal remote control but also a surrogate GUI for inspecting the attributes of these appliances, without modifications to legacy circuits. To minimize the cost and resource requirements of the endomodules, we propose a generalized active message programming method that executes dynamically-loaded threaded code on-demand without requiring parsing.
3D printing – the ability to think of a shape and have a a physical representation of that shape. It’s fast, becoming cheap and as technology improves – able to print with incredible detail and textures.
This then starts to make you think about what you could design either from a functional or aesthetic point of view.
Then from a personal point of view – what artifacts and objects do I have that I would never want to lose. Could I make a copy of an object – in essence save it’s memory. If you copied a family heirloom – a vase for example. Does this still pass on the memories associated with that object.
Could that object even be alive?
How I arrived at this point was when I saw the following image via the shapeways blog. It is an artistic exercise by a dutch design studio wieke somers to look at how products can be made with human ash.
If we put aside the notion of rapid protyping with human ash and use conventional materials – Can we copy objects and use it ‘ash or even ‘stone” as a texture to recreate that object.
Could handheld scanning be so cheap that you can scan anything?
Handheld scanning could soon be so mainstream that you could scan your cute puppy.
Is there a business model there? Unethical? Nonsensical? One people would use?
What if you could send the ‘data’ of your objects to someone as a gift and they take this into a the 3D printing equivalent of snappy snaps – 1hr later they have an object.
I was flicking through a muddle of documents and found a little presentation of how we created the onedotzero brand identity which we gave at the festival. So here is an expanded version with some reminiscing on what I think is the best piece of work I’ve ever been involved with.
Assemble your A-Team
I think it was June 2009 (it *was* June 1st), a little email pops into my inbox – come to a quick brainstorm for a new pitch. It’ll only take a couple of hours. So off I trot and find myself in a room with a hand picked team (Ez, Tom, Dave, Matthew) being introduced to Shane and Sophie from onedotzero.
We are set a brief – Create the new brand identity for the festival on the theme of ‘Convergence and collaboration’. The festival identity has to work across print, motion graphics and if possible interactive. They’ll come back in two hours and we’ll present our ideas – If they like the idea we get the job. No pressure then.
I break out the white board doing my best ‘ideator’ impression breaking down audience segmentation and the like.
1.50 minutes go by – We’ve got zip. Nada.
Then suddenly it all started to click. We knew onedotzero had a massive global fanbase and community, a healthy 700 or so fans on twitter and well we wanted to harness that conversation and visualise it. That was the core of the idea. We presented this back to Shane and soon after we heard we had the job.
So this wasn’t your typical process for creative development. The reason why it was so rapid was a few fold- As an agency we had all just come out of Hyper Island training. They taught us how to break down creative workshops into short intense bursts of activity. This was a pitch and time of five people is sacred so spending this thinking time in an optimised and way was essential.
The other major takeout from Hyper Island was that creative teams should be tailored to the task in hand. If you know your output from the briefing then you need the people who will be making those things in the first creative sessions. This might sound like a facepalm of obviousness but remember we are dealing with an ad agency used to the art director/copywriter model. This was actually a masterstroke by Rob Steiner and Tony Wallace who put the team together.
Friendfeed is your friend
Through the creative development of any idea, we build a physical wall of stimulus. This let everyone on the team (and indeed) the office see what we are upto (this is very important later).
Once the initial concept had been resolved, we now had the very very hard part of actually realising this. We then went through a massive discovery phase (collecting hundreds of stim images) on how to realise ‘kinetic typography’, conversation and metaphors around this.
Collaboration – Living the idea
We knew pretty early on in the project that we would needed help to create some sort of ‘visualiser’ for all this conversation. I had really wanted to work with Karsten Schmidt aka Toxi for a really long time and I knew he would be the perfect person to take the idea further. Luckily for us, he graciously accepted to collaborate with us. David talks about this moment as being defining and I think so to. We would have never succeeded without Karsten coming onboard – This was key to the project and also pretty brave of everyone to let go a little to bring him into the creative team.
Sketches
The amazingly talented Karen Jane had also now come onto the project as our superstar designer and the creative team was now complete. KJ started on a very rigorous design investigation phase and out of this came some super interesting studies of how lines start to intersect each other.
This led to one of our first ‘eureka’ moments when she produced this little sketch.
The metaphor of convergence was clear in the sketch, it felt a bit rigid but we all knew this was the start of a great direction. We just had to convey the ‘conversation’ in there as everyone was clear this was core to understanding the idea.
Magnets
Karsten also started to explore use the metaphor of magnets ‘pulling in the conversation’ as a way of visualising the strands of conversation.
This led to another study in field lines.
Some old code immediately rapidly led to some great sketches.
This then led to further study by KJ which stared to apply the field lines to create the lockup of the ‘onedotzero’ logo.
So now the basic principles of the system were set. We would take the ‘onedotzero’ logo – break the letters down into ‘poles’ and create a system where lines flowed over the poles. Simple really.
Set the goalposts
The last part of the puzzle was moving into 3 Dimensions. For Karsten this was totally trivial and again very rapidly we led to the next sketch.
So the type is impossible read, there is no visualisation of conversation but in that we’ve got nearly all the tasks needed to push things forward. The goalposts were now set…More parts to this story soon…
Gaming is hot again in advertising. I’m not talking about making online games (that is soooo 2000) or even building on top of Foursquare, but taking elements of gaming (achievements, rewards, levels) and applying this in other ways. The recent Nike Grid project was a great example of how these gaming structures could reward realworld participation.
What if we can extend a realworld participation back into videogames.
The brilliant Nike78 project has a film by Nick Marsh where they have hacked a Wii controller into a pair of running shoes. By running on the spot you control the game.
This is genius but restrictive. Could you do this in the real world?
Well actually – possibly yes. Nike+ is out there. By running you accumulate points.
In Grand Theft Auto your character gets fitter and can run further by running more in the game.
Could we combine Nike+ with Grand Theft Auto so that by running in the real world makes your gaming character fitter?
If there was a clear Nike+ API and the developers of GTA chose to implement this feature then it could be possible.
What other physical or social choices could there be to create this same offline/online reward structure?
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Can shopping create points to spend in Farmville?
Again probably yes. There is a Tesco.com API and a partnership with Farmville could be thrashed out.
So can videogames influence our behaviour? I believe we could be at the point where they actually could.
Virgin Media has commissioned UVA to ‘explore the themes of communication and modernity’ as part of their 10th year celebrations of broadband. As a concept, UVA explored the material of optical fibre and stripped back – it is essentially a beam of light.
The response to the brief is a series of installations set across six rooms and four floors of a raw industrial space behind the OXO tower in London.
As you enter the space, you are posed a question. You speak your answer into a microphone and your voice is amplified and distorted as it is played back to you. Slightly amused and curious, you climb the stairs into the darkness.
As your eyes adjust, flashes of red laser light race round the edges of the room to create hard edged forms. It’s an impressive visual mixed with sporadic snippets of voices, and you quickly pass to see the same effect in a smaller room outlining a TV, table and a sofa.
The next room appears to have a long reflective channel down the middle, maybe 10 metres long. Red, green and blue lasers at either end are mixed together to form white light and then this light is reflected and scattered back down the length of the installation. All the time snatches of voices (which you now realise are the responses to the earlier question) are syncopated into a heavy bass track and perfectly matched in time with the laser sequences.
It’s mesmerising, thrilling and the sense of the world of conversation passing through light is beautifully represented. My photos do not do this justice in any way.
The next room appears to have a ‘smiley’ face and the concept wasn’t apparent.
The last room is in the loft of the building is a sequence where lasers from different parts of the room converge on single points as they move. Snippets of news and other sounds are mixed together and this piece (although very beautiful) felt more of a showcase for effects than the strong narrative that was represented earlier in the show.
Overall a stunning achievement – technically and in terms of drama and narrative.
The behind the scenes videos are a lovely touch into the revealing processes involved in creating this type of work.
The V&A museum in London is running the excellent Decode exhibition but tucked away from the crowds is the rather lovely Digital Pioneers exhibition. As you can imagine, it starts to outline how computer art has progressed – from it’s inception to the mid 80′s.
The background to the exhibition is that the V&A acquired two very large collections of computer art (one from Patric Prince) as they are the only museum building an archive of work. This is a startling admission and great work to the V&A for recognising that computers can make art not just be used to make art.
The collection from Patric Prince has a brilliant backstory. Patric was the husband of Robert Holzman who worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in the 70′s. You wouldn’t associate NASA and computer art, but back in the 60′s and 70′s computers were enormous number crunching machines housed mainly in Universities and specialised businesses. The story goes that at the NASA jet propulsion lab, some of the research involved pioneering computer graphics and this grew into the lab having a dedicated computer artist (David Em). Many artists would use the machines to generate their art and there were times where Patric was picking up discarded pieces of work from the floor to file and keep.
People might regard many of the works as primitive in execution, but many of the artworks were created through incredibly crude, laborious and almost ‘blind’ processes. Other artists modified equipment for their own needs and Desmond Paul Henry actually used old WWII mechanical bombsight computers to create his works.
Here are some highlights.
Charles Csuri – ‘Random War’ – 1967
Paul Brown – ‘A-B Modulars’ – 1977
Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton – ‘Studies in Perception’ – 1997
I went to the Barbican last night for the Ron Arad: Restless exhibition. It was a really interesting showcase of his work mainly focusing on his chairs (but also including lighting design, shelving and architecture). This sounds really very dull but it wasn’t. The chairs were highly sculptural, organic and bordering on jewellery in many case.
Overall a very playful and fun experience. The set design of the exhibition used big LED screens to take you through the concepts and the meaning behind many of the pieces.
The last part of the exhibition focused on his architecture. Really interesting to see how his style evolves into large scale buildings.
The flickr gallery below showcases the exhibition.
Lolita – A Chandelier you can SMS.
Ron Arad: Restless
18 Feb–16 May/10
Bold, experimental and inventive, Ron Arad defies categorisation. This internationally acclaimed London based maverick is variously described as a designer, architect or artist.
To celebrate, Barbican Art Gallery stages the first major exhibition in the United Kingdom of the internationally acclaimed, London-based design maverick Ron Arad.
Ron Arad: Restless explores three decades of Arad’s designs from his early post-punk approach of assembling products from readymade parts to his exclusive and highly-polished sculptural pieces. Featuring a dramatic exhibition design by Ron Arad Associates using the latest LED display technology, Ron Arad: Restless also includes architectural designs and immediately recognisable mass-produced items. Highlighting the significance of experimentation, process and materials in Arad’s work, the exhibition offers a timely insight into the development of objects from initial idea and fabrication to finished design.
Being a great white shark can’t be all bad can it. Your one of the top predators in the sea, you live for a really long time and just roam the sea looking for dolphin sushi or a seal pup that just so happens to wander by – basically life is pretty good.
Now take the salmon, everyone is trying to eat you because you taste damn good. To reproduce you have risk life and fin and swim for thousands of miles back to where you were born – it’s a pretty tough but determined life.
So is it better to the be the shark of the salmon? Well just as long as the shark is getting good food then there is a clear winner, but what happens if the supply chain of food runs out – or worse your being fed rotten food. So turn this analogy to advertising where the sharks are the advertising agencies – they are fed a steady supply of product advertising briefs and do so across all the channels they have.
A few years ago this would have been fine – a big TV commercial resulting in lots of exposure and hopefully lots of sales. But then the internet kind of happened and then this whole social media thing kicked off. Now that google includes live twitter feeds directly into searches, the truth about a product has never been easier to guage by a consumer.
So whats the problem? Make great products and the advertising will take care of itself (the apple approach?). But happens when there is a bad product? The answer is don’t be in the position of advertising bad products. Trouble is, as your the shark, your just there casually swimming around waiting for the next big meal so you don’t have any say in this.
The salmon hasn’t been waiting around to be fed, he’s been battling long and hard swimming upstream to get the source of all the ideas and products. Getting involved with product teams to make future products better of even instigate new products. This breedofagency might even taken on briefs to market the products they’ve co-created with the client thus cutting off future food for the sharks.
So don’t be a shark, be a salmon. Just watch out for those bears.
The Kinetica Art Fair was on over the weekend and I wandered down to see the sights and sounds. Having been the previous year, I was well prepared for more steampunk cyber art but the talks last year were the highlight – although this year I missed the talks.
So onto the show. It was PACKED full of people which was great for everyone. I’m really hoping it was a massive success and elevated new forms of art to the masses. Here is a bref recap of caught my eye.
This was a mechanical drawing device that took plaster casts of heads and traced their contours and drew them out onto paper – A sort of 3D to 2D process. It was really interesting to watch it happen in realtime and the mechanical direct feel really made me want to watch this artwork form. The output was just as interesting – Something a bit disgusting and indefinable.
A very simple yet beautiful piece of work – If you imagine hundreds of threads of light forming ethereal bodies floating in space. I think the artist used fibre optic cables and ‘cut’ them to let the light bleed out thus creating the forms. There was no interaction or gimmickry (something common to a lot of the work) and I really liked it.
Kinetic Masters
My favourite section of the fair was the area devoted to pioneers of computer / cyber art. You can imagine at the time just how far these guys were innovating and their pieces are still of artistic value to this day. Just shows the process of creating art is irrelevant if the end result connects with you on some level.
I had heard of this ground breaking show at the I.C.A and it was brilliant to study the poster up close. A lovely piece of polish graphic design. A shame I left my camera at home as I wanted to note down all the artists present – If anyone has the poster or the programme of artists could they drop me a line. I’m sure I recalled that Xenakis was present.
So overall a very interesting experience. Some of the ‘art’ I would classify as playful interactions but then others would class it as art or even the process of creating the art. A debate I couldn’t get drawn to far into.
For another review of the fair, check Chris O’ Sheas excellent pixelsumo site.
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