Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
The ever lasting effect of the Internet on Television, or as I call it the TV post Internet.
See Eric Schmidt’s Edinburgh Festival Keynote which can be read in full on PaidContent.
The concept and idea of a BBC Micro for the 21st Century, which some are saying could be the Raspberry Pi.
Been thinking about this stuff deeply recently for work and what I’ll be doing in the near future… You might be interested in some of the Top10’s I’ve been creating on top10.co
People have been asking me, what do I feel about Steve Jobs stepping down as CEO of Apple.
The markets have already spoken… But to be honest, I do wish him well although I talk smack about him and Apple all the time. For Apple, I do think the real test will be 2-4 years down the line when the current crop of products and services are a little old or long in the tooth.
The problem with having a leader dishing out his wisdom from on high, means when their gone (in what ever way) the single vision is lost or not communicated in the same way. And frankly I don’t think anyone will be able to follow Steve Jobs into the void.
Of course I don’t want to speak too ill of the sick but I’m really hoping Tim Cook can bring a little more openness to Apples future. Under Steve Jobs it was just never going to happen.
They say when you get older you become more conservative than before, maybe this sums up Apple’s recent moves to control and conquer?
Still loving my Kindle specially now I can use my phone as a Wifi hotspot/Mifi. I’m usually tweeting something I’ve read on the way to work. I’ve described my kindle ecosystem but recently I’m starting to notice more services supporting the Kindle, here’s the better one…
Cold Climate tweeted me this… Kindle It lets you send articles you find on the web to your Kindle or other e-reader for easy reading. It is being developed as part of the Five Filters project to promote independent, non-corporate media.
Its pretty nice, specially the Android App which is handy for on the go sending. I’ve used send to Kindle in the past but to be honest I hardly need to send from my HTC Desire to the Kindle. Maybe when I get a Tablet, it might be different.
But I’ve started using NewstoEbook which is great perfect for myself because I use Google Reader for quite a bit of my news. The problem I had was that the subscriptions were quite large and calibre would do its thing and collect them all up to a certain point and then time out. Meaning I would only get the first lot of subscriptions. Even if it did, the file size of the final ebook would be too big to send via email to the Kindle.
News to Ebook is great but I’m trying to find a way to automate the whole process… It seems tricky because of the need to automate the Oauth part and select the subscription to make the ebook from.
My only negative comment is when it creates the ebooks, it doesn’t generate index correctly, so you can’t browse the ebook like most other ebooks. Hopefully the author can solve this problem by updating the script, engine, etc which generates the ebooks.
Even on this small image above you can clearly see the microphone key. That key is a dyslexic’s dream as I mentioned before.
So it was great to hear Mike Cohen, Manager of Speech Technology, at Google talking about his role on ITC’s Tech nation and how the decision was made to make speech another valid input not a extra function.
Genius! +1
Its been about 2 months since we moved into Media City. Brendan created a video which give a nice overview of the great new space we have.
A couple of months ago BBC Research and Development’s North Lab moved into its new home at MediaCity UK in Salford. The old base at Oxford Road in Manchester had been home for a good few years for some so, while excited about our shiny new facilities, it was with fondness and some sadness that we bid the Outside Broadcast building, ‘round the back, in the carpark, goodbye. Above is a short film about the last days of Oxford Road and the start of our new working lives in Salford.
There’s no doubt, its great being in Media City. Specially when the sun is shining.
There are some downsides like the lack of a BBC Club but on the upside there’s a massive sense of anything can and will happen if we want it to. And to be fair the work I’m on, reflects that (more on this in the near future).
For example, BarCampMediaCityUK. After 5 years of trying to do a BBC hosted barcamp by multiple people, we finally got the ecstatic yes from BBC Workplace, who to be fair has been nothing but great with there lovely floor walkers and generally useful security guards. We hit them with the concept of the stay over they took it all in there stride. I swear if we said we want to run a barcamp for 7 days they would have considered it. The barcamp is just getting off the ground but there will be more details coming along soon enough…
Back to MediaCity, the downside of having no BBC Club has meant we’ve had to entertain ourselves. Its still early days but we regularly have Tuesday evening drinks in the canteen/cafe/restaurant, which is a great chance to meet new faces. Not quite sure how it will scale but we’ll iterate I guess.
I’ve started a circus skills event outside on the grassy areas when its sunshine and there’s also the Salford cinema club. Others events and things are a foot including curry nights, yoga, the last friday club, etc… And thats just the start…
More shops are coming and Salford University is going to open right next door so its going to be quite a hotspot.
Getting to MediaCityUK has been pretty easy for me to date. I walk down to Picadilly Station and jump on a tram directly to mediacityuk if I’m in no rush or maybe a tram to Bury if in a rush. It takes about 35mins door to door and should get slightly quicker when the SportsCity/Ashton tram extension opens. I’ll be able to jump on a tram at New Islington and change at Picadilly. Its maybe quicker to walk down but with a yearly travel card and not in rush, I might as well make use of it. The line is believed to open in time for the new football season, but thats just hear-say, although its worth noting there running tests every night right now.
New ways of working isn’t just a saying, we’re really trying out new ways of working. I personally work from the Northern Quarter quite a bit. Not only that there’s a whole bunch of changes happening with regards to our machines. We already upgraded to Windows 7 a while back but dear I say it, Ubuntu and other gnu/linux operating systems are being somewhat tolerated. Of course in R&D, it has been for quite sometime.
My only complaints right now are, the lack of a cash machine in mediacity as the restaurant only accept cash (although they are going to put in place a credit system soon) and when it does rain, the run across the Piazza can be very cold and wet. Right now its amazing in the sunshine…
The move to Media City was a good move and I’m very glad I made the jump when I did. Now I look forward to do some amazing things in our new home and break all the rules with collaborations all over the world.
The era of personal data openness
Following my post about the advantages of being dyslexic, Cristiano Betta finds this and sends me a link to Dyslexie
Talking to Dave and others about Dyslexic typefaces… They seem to have not taken off simply because there not free, which seems a real shame.
I was thinking how interesting it would be to hack this onto my Kindle…
10 years of Bit Torrent I wrote in a recent twitter post, after reading Torrent freak on my kindle a while back…
It feels like so much longer and I wonder if thats a sign of real disruption?
It feels like its been here forever and you almost can’t remember before it. Life is forever changed… Imagine life before the mobile phone? No I can’t really either…
Since I switched to Gnome3 I’ve been finding some weird inconsistencies. The problem is, I can’t be sure its actually Gnome3 or something else?
My first ignorance is the vertical only workspaces. I’m use to using ctrl+alt+left/right to wizz around the work spaces I have open (usually about 6). Now the left and right does nothing and you can only wizz around the available workspaces by doing ctrl+alt+up/down. From reading the web, it seems the only reason for it is because of the Activities mode.
If they could rearrange that it would work quite well.
Gnome-Do is also a little lost now, because of the total change in Gnome 3 shell. I do still use it over the windows/super key which brings up the menu and other stuff. But had to change the mappings to ctrl+space instead of super+space to avoid conflict with Gnome3. If you do hit the super key and start typing it will find stuff for you but its no where near as clever as Gnome Do. What needs to happen is Gnome do needs to be a plugin for Gnome shell or something. Not heard anything from the author about this yet. The last update was quite some time ago to be fair, so I’m not even sure its still going or not. I also noticed that the dock option seems to have gone from Gnome do, which I wonder is to do with Gnome 3’s Dash or not?
Alt+Shift+Tab no longer seems to go backwards when selecting windows which is a real pain (and yes I do have that set in my keyboard options). What makes things maybe worst is you can’t seem to easily select windows within an application from the Alt+Tab menu. So instead you have to hover over a sub window menu which shows the application windows. This is a real pain when using something like Evolution with lots of sub windows of old and new emails. Even using Dolphin (file manager) with multiple windows is a nightmare.
The Activities menu/Window Picker is a nice style exposure type system but selecting windows is a nightmare because you can’t tab or shift+tab. Instead your forced to use your mouse to select windows and applications. You can type in what your after like Gnome Do but that only selects new applications not applications/windows which are already running. There’s this easily overlooked highlight which shows you whats open already and whats not but its too easily missed.
I’m hearing Gnome 3 is not very good about handling multiple screens and I can believe it if you can’t move left or right. I’ll find out for sure tomorrow when I return to work and plug my laptop into a 24″ LCD monitor which sits on my desk.
I certainly think something is up because I’m not getting the lovely way Gnome 3 should look going by the Gnome 3 Design page.
I do still miss my Compiz 3D rotating cube but if they can get some of these issues solved I’m willing to change and kind of embrace the new style of Gnome 3, specially if they can sort out the horizontal and reversal stuff. I’m very interested in some of the other stuff I’ve seen like Gnome Shell with Zeitgeist (gnome activity journal) replacing part of the shell.
Its also worth pointing out Webupd8 which I thought was a spammer site but actually turns out to be a good site for the latest to do with Gnome Shell and Unity.
So everyone’s going crazy about Google Plus right now but am I the only one to notice, Google just rolled over and crushed Prezi. And to be honest, I’m glad they did or might do because that Prezi technology (if you can call it that) needed a good solid kick off the web. Like I said before, the concept is not bad but the actual process is a joke and not realistic for giving presentations. I’ll refer you to the conversation me and Nancy Duarte had at Thinking Digital.
The interesting part is, I don’t think Google is even thinking about it in that way. So Prezi lives on for now. But if Google was to license there technology or make it easy for people to build there own google maps like layers, it would be all over for Prezi… And once again, good riddens.
People have been wondering what am I up to since Backstage closed down.
Well its kind of hard to describe but generally I’ve become the resident troublemaker, breaking all types of rules and really etching a new kind of path for myself. If I was going to explain it in a buzz word compliant way, it would be something like… Senior Emerging and Disruptive Grassroots Specialist for BBC R&D.
Yeah feel free to be sick all over your screens.
But one aspect I certainly want to focus on is new types disruption and innovation from the edges or grassroots.
So part of my new job will be seeking the seeds of disruption and innovation before they get to the point of broad adoption.
I come with examples…
Most of the people reading this have been on Twitter at least 4 years, and we could see something interesting was going on with Microblogging but no one really knew what? About 4.5 years ago I met the guys from Twitter (Ev and Biz) and I did talk about what we (BBC) could do with Twitter. Unfortunately I working on Backstage, meant my focus was on data. Although we did talk about what the opportunities Twitter might give the BBC. Of course most of that went up in smoke and Twitter marched on to establish a business model (ok not a very good one but its still something) and a certain amount of dominance in the microblogging and social fields.
Just imagine what would have happened if things turned out different. The point is there was something there and with a good trial someone else could have identified it as something interesting that the BBC should look deeper into.
How I find interesting stuff?
I mostly rely on the people around me for pointers. Thats why I tend to only follow a small number of people on twitter. But I also look at what certain people are up to. In actual fact, its this aspect which bough me to the BBC. Seeing what Tom Coates, Paul Hammond, Matt Patterson, Ben Metcalfe etc were up to really got me going. I had no idea who they were originally but most of them were pretty accessible in person, which really helped.
But as I’ve noticed and you would expect the list of innovators changes all the time. Not that I’m not saying these guys are not doing anything interesting. Actually they may be but new people come along all the time.
I’ve ping’ed a few people about the idea of what I’ll be doing into the future and had various comments back. Some positive, some quite negative but all a great help with lots of ideas and thoughts. One of the most provoking has to be the idea of it being an inbreed network. It really got me thinking… How do you have a network of trusted people but not make it your friends and keep the signal strong?
The obvious example seems to be keep it open… But with openness comes the trouble of keeping the noise out. Its a challenge but I’m hoping to tackle it in a social sciency kind of way.
I really like what Mozilla has done with there Drumbeat projects. But there is a theme which means people are rally around an idea or concept at least. But its wide open, which means you can get right to the edge, no messing. The best way to get stuff from very left-field. Actually I’ve been thinking instead of copying Mozilla, maybe there’s a way to leverage or even work with Mozilla for the benefit of both organisations?
Documenting stuff no matter what
Theres lot of things BBC R&D does which it classes as a throw away experiment and then years later I see something which resembles the original concept or idea. Its critically important to document and I would say share the successes as well as the failures. In R&D right now, we tend to bury this in obscure papers which don’t get to see the light of day. I always wanted to get away from writing papers but have fallen into the trap of writing papers too.
There are better ways, be it prototypes, a series of detailed blog entries, whatever works to document experiments and projects. I don’t doubt a properly authored paper with many citations are a better that a blog post. But if the paper becomes the reason why documentation isn’t done, then maybe its a problem? Right?
I’ve noticed a whole bunch of new ways to document stuff, most of them are simply prototypes filmed and put on youtube. It won’t stand up to much scrutiny but at the point it needs to, then thats when the paper can be written. Its like that all too familiar innovation funnel. Things are cheaper at the start than the end. Maybe you don’t want to commit to writing a lengthy paper when a series of blog post will aid writing the paper at a later date. The blog post can also function as prior art too.
What I have to recognize is that I work in the Emergence stage of innovation.
Emergence – (also known as embryonic stage) shows little improvement in key performance characteristic. Technology operates far below its potential. Neither the characteristics of technology nor its applicability to market needs may be well understood. A long gestation period exists before attempts are made to produce a technology. This new invention period is characterized by a period of slow initial growth. This is the time when experimentation and initial bugs are worked out of the system.
Its ok to be wrong
its ok to be haphazard
Its ok to not have all the answers
its ok to bounce from one thing to another.
Just as long as the experiments are cheap, documented and understanding is formed and shared internally and sometimes externally.
So with all that, spilled out across the this blog entry… I’m coming around to something which is I think very impressive and fundamentally what the BBC really needs now and for the future.
I guess its exactly what the guys behind Backstage were thinking before backstage was formed in 2004.
Wish me luck…
I took a picture of a paper display in the BBC Manchester office the other day…
It seems like every week they may replace the old informational display with a new one. But it got me wondering… its quite a simple visualisation and yes you could project the same thing or even put it on a large lcd screen but why not a massive eink screen instead?
Then I did some digging around… Where’s all the large scale eink screens?
From wikipedia…
Other proposed applications include digital photo frames and information boards
But where are the information boards? Sure they will be expensive but over a course of years they can’t be that bad compared to a projector or a large LCD display
My only thoughts are…
So odd because I can certainly find reasons to use a eink display, even a A3 and A2 sized display. Imagine photo frames which you can change every once in a while but very flat and light. Perfect for hanging on the wall…
May is a strange time… It seems to be the start of a series of conferences in the North of England including Future Everything. In this case it was time to head up to Newcastle/Gateshead for the inspiring and always fantastic Thinking Digital conference.
Like Future Everything, I missed last year due to the bleed on the brain. Herb Kim last year gave me a shout out, live on stage (of course I wasn’t there) but this year he did the same in between a couple of speakers. It was very touching and later on Adrian pointed out that there was something in the conference booklet too. So thank you again to Thinking Digital and Herb Kim.
Generally the conference was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, lots of people I kind of remember and lots of people who remember me from previous years. It was very noticeable to me, how badly I forgot peoples names but hey I have a great excuse… 🙂 It was also great seeing Marissa Mulvena, Kate Norman and Emilia Flockhart along side all the other lovely people.
The Workshop – The Practice of Happiness – Bobby Paterson
I attended and enjoyed the practice of happiness with Bobby. I didn’t quite know what to expect but I was pleasantly surprised. Bobby ran through a whole lot of inspirational books that he had read and would recommend.
Its fair to say it was a decent summary without touching any of the religious or overall self help stuff. Bobby quoted Jim Rohn saying Happiness is not a accident nor is it something you aspire to, its actually something you design or even architect. Quite fitting with the talk from Bill Thompson at Future Everything about designing your future.
Some interesting facts. We have roughly 60,000 thoughts a day and 95% of them are the same as yesterday and 80% of those are negative in nature.
Then following that Bobby directed the questioning to work. Does your companies attitudes and values align with your own personal values? Luckily I would say indeed it does. He then went on to talk about Tony Heish from Zappos as a great example of what can be done in work. Bobby also hit the point about being more transparent and what that could mean for happiness.
He then talked about the social network (aptly named happie.st) he was setting up off the back of his research into happiness. There’s 7 happy habits as Bobby called them running through the network. Those habits are…
To be honest and I did say this to Bobby, its a nice idea but I’m concerned about the social networking aspect of it. I think for it to be truly useful it needs to be more fluid than yet another social network. I understand there’s the ability to send stuff into other social networks but honestly its needs to be something more transparent. I was thinking about a microformat for wellbeing and good habits could be interesting. Of course Bobby could keep the social network too, but aggregate stuff outside of it.
End of the day, it was a good talk and I am intrigued specially with my own shift (still not sure how I feel about this movie) or lifestyle change.
And that was just the workshop…
The conference was even more fantastic. Like Future Everything I’ll just run through the highlights of the conference but I wanted to also wanted to discuss a few of the conference things. You can think of it as feedback to the Thinking Digital committee.
Right time for the best talks of the conference
Erin McKean from Wordnik
Erin McKean likes to call herself a Dictionary Evangelist. She is the CEO of the new online dictionary Wordnik and prior to that she was the Editor in Chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary. She is the author of ‘Weird and Wonderful Words’, ‘More Weird and Wonderful Words’, ‘Totally Weird and Wonderful Words’, and ‘That’s Amore’ (also about words).
Erin from Wordnik gave a great presentation about building the largest Dictionary. The presentation was pretty straight forward but fascinating. The new developer API sounds like tons of fun.
Wordnik fits really well with my thoughts around the way language evolves at a fascinating pace. Hopefully we can help Wordnik in some way in the near future.
Conrad Wolfram, Wolfram Research
Conrad Wolfram is European founder and CEO of Wolfram Research and its worldwide strategic director. Since 1988, the Wolfram group has built the Mathematica computational software and since 2009, the spin-off Wolfram|Alpha knowledge engine.
Another great talk with some useful examples on demonstration.wolfram.com. Interestingly Wolfram have launched a computational document format (CDF)
CDF—the computable document format—is a way that we’ll be releasing soon of very easily creating dynamic, interactive, documents that immediately build on all the algorithms and automation that we’ve been setting up in Mathematica for the past 24 years.
I assumed it would be XML based but its unfortunately not. Anyhow, the reason seems to be sound due in part to the Mathematica engine being embedded in part in the document.
Sam Martin, Manspaces
Author Sam Martin shares photos of a quirky world hobby that’s trending with the XY set: the “manspace.” (They’re custom-built hangouts where a man can claim a bit of his own territory to work, relax, be himself.) Grab a cold one and enjoy.
Just as Herb Kim said in his intro, you kind of don’t really want to like the talk but honestly it was an insight into how people get away and use there own spaces. Some would have liked to ask questions about the notion that its man spaces instead of just work spaces? Oh well I guess they could twitter him, if they were that upset. Good talk and plenty to think about
Nancy Duarte, Duarte Design
Nancy Duarte is one of the world’s foremost authorities on presentation development and design. She is the founder of Duarte Design, who specialise in presentation mastery and visual communications. Duarte design is also one of Silicon Valley’s most successful and largest woman-owned businesses.
I had the pleasure of sitting next to Nancy at the speakers Dinner before the conference and I was already a fan when we talked about Prezi (which Matthew Postgate used in his presentation and I’ve written about before) and she said it can be useful in a very small number of cases but generally it distracts from the core messages and the flow of the presentation. And after listening to her talk, shes totally right, can you ever imagine Steve Jobs or Martin Luther King, using Prezi? Not a chance in hell…
The analysis of the flow of the best presentations is killer information. Once you know and understand it, its really obvious but very powerful. Thank you Nancy… I’ll hopefully improve my presentations forever more.
Dr Vincent W. Li, Angiogenesis Foundation
Li tackles a common denominator of disease called angiogenesis, or new blood vessel growth. He created the Foundation in 1994 and currently oversees the Eat to Defeat initiative and ENABLE project, a global system that integrates patients, medical experts and healthcare professionals and democratises the spread and implementation of knowledge about angiogenesis-based medicines, diet and lifestyle.
Vincent gave an emotional but very smart talk about the research he and his brother have been working on. Angiogenesis is the process of growing new blood vessels from pre-existing blood vessels. This process is also how tumors go from dormant to a state of malignant. Some foods can give the effect of a Angiogenesis inhibitor or Anti-Angiogenesis.
Yes if you understood correctly (videos should helps), we might be able to prevent Cancer by eating more of certain types of food. Which types of food, I bet your wondering? Which ones? Well here’s the full list and I’ve picked out the surprising ones…
But its not just cancer… Angiogenesis is a major factor in other medical conditions such as Obesity and Stress.
Its a lot to take in at first and to be fair I really need to do some more research into these claims but honestly if eating more fruit and vegetables helps to defeat cancer and other problems, then I’m there. I’ve already made huge changes in my lifestyle, if this works or even if it doesn’t I’ll certainly be stacking up my shopping trolley with more things from the list.
I did get a chance to talk to Vincent about the whole thing and he was very open to hearing the good and negative comments. The problem seems to be the lack of a clinical/scientific trial over a wide group of people. He said they have trials over 100,000 people but they were not clinical due to the nature of the subject. It was expressed that trying to do a mass clinical/scientific trial would never really be achievable because there’s far too many factors to consider.
Its important to remember this is all preventive not a cure.
Anyway… Something to check out for sure.
Mary Anne Hobbs, XFM
I have to admit I had not heard any of the back story of why she had left the BBC, and she wasn’t actually on the schedule but with all the craziness of the ash cloud and speakers stranded in different locations. Herb convinced her to stand in for someone else and tell her side of the story.
The interview was done by herb and felt like he had planned it from the very start. Very professional but with hints of friendliness. It was a excellent interview and one of those pinnacle moments in Thinking Digital which defines the 2011 conference…
The Others
Its also worth mentioning Steven Bathiche, Walter de Brouwer, Paul Smith, Matthew Postgate, Carlos Ulloa, Casper Berry, Tan Lee, Gred Leonhard, Jer Thorp, Atau Tanaka, Heather Knight, Ewan McIntosh and finally Tom Scott. All added equally good talks and worth mentioning. Musical interludes by Badaia was certainly interesting but after the 3rd time got a little tiresome.
Would I say Thinking Digital 2011 was better that 2009? Well I would say they were about the same, both had tiny things you could groan about but on the whole they were amazing and a truly inspiring.
Excellent work again, Herb and the Thinking Digital team, can’t wait for 2012…
My experiments/hacking with the kindle has lead me to this point.
I’m on my way to thinking digital in Gateshead/Newcastle and with the kindle in my jacket pocket and I’m wondering how this whole thing would work. It seems likely that Amazon never really intended for there software to be used in this way and so there will be a massive delay in sharing notes during a conference. But in actual fact, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
When I though about using the kindle for notes, I didn’t want some sudo realtime thing. There’s already plenty of those type of systems. In actual fact just being able to write my own short notes and then share them was good enough. But if I can make some of those notes sharable then even better. Of course if someone else wants to share there notes with me, then cool beans but when I tend to write notes, they tend to only really make sense to the mind of a dyslexic designer/developer (oh thats me).
I guess part of the experiment is working out if;
Continue reading “Annotating Thinking Digital my forthoughts and aftermath“
The Future Everything conference was great this year… The line up was a mixed bag of speakers, which kept me guessing…
As mentioned in the post before, I took notes on my kindle. Here are the ones I highly recommend
Our global urban future
No picture but a great talk about.
The ‘internet of things’, refers to the technical and cultural shift as society moves to a 24/7 form of computing in which every device is ‘always on’, and every device is connected in some way to the internet. However, many versions of this notion rely upon one significant premise: that the thing remains in existence.
Cities are often said to be humanity’s greatest creation. It is in cities that most wealth is created and destroyed and it is from cities that most human creations and social innovations flow.
This presentation was a excellent look at our future in a world of cities. Its weird that even with all the disadvantages of living close together, nature tends to prefer cooperative emergent properties. Two examples which were given was the Ant hill and the Beehive. Interestingly productivity decreases with colony size but somehow it works, in actual fact as a city doubles its economic productivity per capita increases by 15%. Jane Jacobs was bounded about quite a bit, with the notion that cities simply amplify interaction including the 16% increase in violent crime.
But Revolutions always happen in cities because groups of people expect better. Finally there was lots to think about in regards to the general speed of cities. Its almost like the gravitational effect of larger objects on smaller objects. There’s more to do and see, so it feels like things are much quicker.
Really got me thinking how I can’t really imagine living anywhere else.
Robots, Editors, Strangers & Friends
Meg Pickard and Dan Catt explore some of the ways that attention and social patterns influence the way we discover, consume and curate content online.
Its so strange, I’ve never formally met Meg Pickard but have occupied the same space virtually and physically many times. Her and Dan ran through a bunch of thoughts which although not new to me, kind of crystallised a lot of them.
Generally…
However there was lots of discussion about gaming these patterns. All very interesting, specially with the context that Dan Catt use to work on Flickr.
Against the background hum of continuous technological change, contemporary urban life has undergone lasting and undeniable changes. Our views on public space, civic engagement and what it means to live well in a city have changed accordingly. Various types of organizations seek to influence urban life for the good of society, for their own interest or a combination of both. At the same time, games and play have started to break out of the traditional frame of the video screen. On the one hand, this has given us all kinds of interesting experiments in pervasive, urban and alternate reality gaming. On the other hand, more recently, it has given rise to a program of playful persuasive technology now commonly know as gamification.
Kars started his presentation with the simple question. Should kids grow up with Lego or Starwars figures? The point was about constructive vs surface play. The point was about open ended play, and was played out through out his talk. He felt unplanned playtime for us all was becoming less and less, it was time to return to the Adventure playground.
And I got to agree… Actually my question was about the bunch of skateboarders who use the steps near my flat as a place to challenge each other. Some people really hate them being there although they never actually interfere with people walking by. ISIS also stuck up signs saying no skateboarding which of course hasn’t stopped them. There simply taking advantage of the constructs of our cities, just like the rise of free running. Unscripted play makes our cities fun and a joy to be in, maybe our cities and lives are too structured right now? Serendipity is fun.
Kars called Gamification motivated play and he’s not actually wrong. Its certainly a canny observation which I hadn’t actually thought about before. There’s certainly a rush to inject gamification into almost anything recently. The warning was against shallow play like coke points. Ending with the point I’ve heard many times…
You do not play a gamificated system it plays you…
For centuries we’ve built our cities around ourselves, and our needs. As our prosthetics have advanced, they’ve shifted according to the needs of automobiles and electricity, but we have remained at the centre. Now, the city is reconfiguring itself around the network in subtle and intriguing ways.
James did a great job explaining how we’ve build places where the robots work. He started off with a picture of a robot jockey and how it was used to replace small children riding on camel’s backs. And somewhere got on how Amazon’s warehouses are optimised for robots over people and how the roumba and neato cleaning robots are like inviting a alien into your living room.
Bill will provide a unique coda to the 2011 edition of FutureEverything, reflecting on the themes explored throughout the conference as well as his own perspectives on areas of the future that hold promise.
We are increasingly establishing a culture where information has become the modern era’s defining quality. As humanity’s transactions are increasingly articulated and mediated in digital forms, what becomes of those that lack the access or literacy to participate in those transactions? Indeed, is such a civilisation a better civilisation?
Bill Thompson’s "keynote like" presentation was fantastic. He talked about the revolution of tools. Tools that fundamentally change us, change the way we perceive our reality. There was a revolution through literacy century’s ago and it fundamentally changed the way our brains work.
Its hard to do it much justice in written form but I was literally punching the sky inside my mind while he spoke out to the slightly skeptical crowd. I kind of wished it was recorded…
He ended the presentation with a slide saying "if you don’t design the future someone else will…"
The point was Digital Culture is now the dominate culture now. "We won! Digital Culture won…" Thinking digitally is fundamental and analogue thinking is on its way out, like it or not.
A strangely inspiring and excellent talk…
Continue reading “Future Everything: If you don’t design the future someone else will…“