Category: design-and-ideas

A smarter city called Bristol

Giant mirror ball

The city of Bristol has announced a multi-million pound experiment to create the smart city of the future.

As soon as I heard this, I was worried. As there is something about Bristol which I hadn’t really got till I left. Bristol is a city where things are done differently. Where art and business are in conflict with each other and that conflict drives the continuing disruption and creativity.

I needed not worry…

Bristol is Open, the project will effectively turn Bristol into a giant laboratory and look at how big data can be used to solve problems such as airpollution, traffic congestion and assisted living for the elderly. The network could also be used to collect and understand data from the city’s trial of self-driving cars. Bristol is one of four UK cities currently testing driverless car technology as part of a government scheme.

Sensors and other internet of things devices will be hooked up to the network to collect huge amounts of data from the city. In one example it would be possible to use tracking technology to collect location data from vehicles used by the health, education and city transport sectors to try and solve the city’s traffic congestion problems.

I only recently learned Bristol was the 2nd most congested city in the UK and hated by many of car drivers. Hopefully the artistic, creative and playful nature of the city will persist throughout.

Bristol's Park Street water-slide

Got to love Bristol…

Alternative user interfaces

I studied interaction design in university and always had an imprecation for good interaction and interface design. Recently I seen a few examples which have got me a little excited.

Ubuntu’s scopes
I like ubuntu’s unity paradigms of scopes and lens, even though I prefer to use Gnome Shell as my default on the desktop. The scopes and lens really make a lot of sense. It was fascinating to see Ubuntu apply it across their phone and tablet. Be interesting to see how it works on Ubuntu TV if thats still ongoing?

Pebble timeline
When I first saw the pebble time interface, I instantly thought, when are they going to roll that across there existing line of smartwatches? If not, maybe I might invest in one of the new ones. Division of a interface by future, present and the past on a watch makes a lot more sense than anything else I have seen to date including the Apple Watch.

Android Material Design
Ice cream sandwich or Android 4.0 was a massive step up in style for Android but Android 5.0 Lollipop really was the first Android when the interaction design was thought about at a deeper level.

I don’t necessarily  like the style of flat plates of colour for example the Google hangout app is just the wrong kind of green for my pallet but the interaction model is nice. Although I have spotted a few places where the rules are broken by certain apps.

Remix is the future!

Theres the intenet 1% rule which seems to pop up all the time.

I’ve been thinking recently out of 100 people using social media , 1 person will want to create and upload their own media. However 9 people if the user interface is effortless, smooth and simple, would make slight changes to either reflect their own decisions, point of view, etc.

This is reflected in the 1% rule where 90% are lurkers, 9% are contributors and 1% creators.

Its strikes me that many things are missing the 9%. They miss the fact that the 9% can also contribute to the enjoyment of the 90% and be even more interesting than the 1%.

What makes the 9% even more interesting is the fact they are socially creative, sharing as they go.

Everything is a remix and that includes,

  • Git repo forks which is beautiful way to build upon something you’ve seen or used.
  • Creative Commons which encourages you to remix media
  • The fans who spend their own time building on top of the official works to create fan art at places like Deviant Art
  • The millions of meme created pictures which fill social media feeds,  even I became a meme thanks to Tim and Josh.
  • The insane amount of feeds, webservices, APIs and even headless websites which encourage you to build on top of them.
  • The pinterest fans who collect and arrange their pinboards to indicate there choices and style
  • The many fan fiction stories which take characters out of one world and combine them in others

This is why I feel the DJ hackday could be a start of something extra special .

The walls eyes up a design award

BBCRD up for a design award

So happy for Libby, Andrew and Jasmine who worked on the Walls have eyes exhibition within the ethical dilemma cafe at Mozilla Fest last year. Its been a bit of a secret but now its been announced along with the other digital entries.

Mozfest 2014

Knock them over guys! It was a great idea and the images were so great. So happy to have given you guys the space to run it and frankly make us think about the ethics of our personal data some more.

Interestingly while thinking about the ethics of personal data, Doc Searls and David Weinburger recently kindly took time out of their busy schedule to talk about the Cluetrain and NewClues at Commonground. Doc said something which got people going a little…

..what seems to have struck the Chord of Controversy was something I blabbed: “Tracking-based advertising is creepy and wrong… and needs to be wiped out.” Martin Bryant (@MartinSFP)tweeted a video clip and a series of other tweets followed.

Being tracked around spaces is something we did within the ethical dilemma cafe and its a mistake to think others are not doing this already.

The dilemma is what are you going to do? And I’d love to see a proper public debate about this all. Maybe this could be arranged following some of the work I’m about to release…

 

The internet is the singularity?

It was something David and Doc said on Twit’s Trianglation #186.

David compared the internet to the transformation of language. Doc added the internet renders distance to zero, which is pretty amazing to think about when looking at the cluetrain rules especially my favourite one – Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. This is only possible because of the internet era.

This got me thinking, if the internet is as transformational as language, and there’s thought that language could be one of the first singularities. Then that would make the internet the singularity?

This raises a ton of observations I and others have wondered about.

  • What technologies are likely to cause the next singularity?
  • When will the next singularity happen?

and my own…

  • Will we know, we are experiencing a singularity as we are in one? (getting meta about the singularity). Maybe the internet is the singularity and things like the cluetrain is actually carving out the new rules?

Luckily, Doc and David will be talking to us via the singularity in Manchester for the Commonground launch event. You can still get tickets. How’s that for a launch event? We are forever thankful they agreed to take part.

'The Singularity is Near'...very

Talking of singularities…

Ray Kurzweil and others have been talking about how they would like to see stricter controls on artificial intelligence, assuming the singularity is closer than we think.

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, has estimated that robots will reach human levels of intelligence by 2029, purportedly leaving us about 14 years to reign supreme.

Of course theres always the other view, from the rich and educated.

Now I wonder what happened to the energy singularity?

BBC Backstage needed to close, for BBC Taster to happen

BBC Tatser front page

It is my opinion. BBC Taster could not happen if BBC Backstage was still running.

A long time ago there was BBC Backstage, it was great and did a lot for the BBC and the licence payers who didn’t quite fit in the SME/Company bracket but were also not just consumers of the BBC’s output. I would suggest they were the 9% (I don’t think this figure is correct but go with it as it fits the 1% theory) which the BBC had a harder time understanding.

BBC Backstage was a great success and lasted 5 years achieving some incredible things including the first UK hackday. It changed the relationship with the tech & media-savy 9%, who frankly had enough of being treated mere audience members.

But it had to end, for good reasons as explained in my blog about why I shutdown BBC Backstage.The BBC Connected Studio and the newly launched creative playground BBC Taster. Would have been a very different proposition if BBC Backstage was still around. It would also been an injustice to the changing and diverse 9%.

I said in a previous blog…

Things need to end (such as BBC Backstage, Innovation Labs, etc) for others to spark, grow and mature like BBC Connected Studio.

Well you can add BBC Taster to that list of others to spark, grow and mature… I know its not every-bodies cup of tea but change never is, but give it some time.

“Times change, people change, situations change, relationships change… the only thing constant is change.”

Breaking the rules of online dating with bristlr

At Silicon Drinkabout last night, I was introduced to John Kershaw who created a social network/dating site for people with and like beards – Bristlr. (yes this is the uniform dating style thing, basically for anybody)

  • Tell us where you are, and if you have a bear
  • Got a beard? We find people looking for beards
  • Want a beard? We find people with beards worth looking for
  • Send messages to people you match with
  • Your life now contains more beard love, you’re welcome

John seems to have got quite a few people on-board with no advertising or promotion. Its a interesting site and hits a niche really well.

How does it make money? Well funny enough me and John talked about this at length. Unlike most dating sites, he won’t be collecting and selling the data  of the users. His privacy policy seems to follow through on this…

Bristlr

We take your privacy seriously. We won’t sell your data. That’s a dick thing to do.

When you use Bristlr, we collect a fair chunk of data about you, but it’s the bare minimum required for the website to function. All of the information is collected explicitly from you.

As this is the internet, our servers collect loads of info like your IP address and some browser details. We do use standard internet tracking and monitoring software, namely Google Analytics, to tell us about who is using the website.

If ever we need to use your personal information for any reason which isn’t essential to the running of Bristlr, we will ask for your consent.

We may disclose your personal information if we are required by law. But we would be super fucking unhappy if this happened.

There is a premium option (there always is!) which shows you the people you’ve yet to match with who have “liked” you.  But realistically, its the price of a coffee or theres the pyramid approach with a referrals..

Bristlr Matches screen

I’m signed up, giving it a try and of course you can give it a try too for free. Theres a referral if you like to enable me premium for a bit  http://www.bristlr.com/?referral=cubicgarden

I bought into the Philips Hue system but why?

Philips Hue Bridge

After my blog post asking about which smart lighting system works best for me… I choose the Philips Hue system but why?

  1. Philips made its simple REST API public! Yeh!
  2. Seen activity of people hacking around with the Philips hue lights.
  3. Replace my aging and dying Philips Light/wake-up clock.
    It keeps waking me up at the wrong time of the night and missing the alarm time! I barely use it because of this. Looking forward to combining my sleep pattern with my wake up. May even help with my alertness?
  4. Have better control over my living room lighting.
    I like warm lights at night and hate the way the lights are in my living room at the moment but don’t want to do the massive alterations to change it at the moment.
  5. I really want to experiment with XBMC and a Ambelight style setup